


All Alone, I Go With You

by Sunshinebunnie



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canonical Self-Harm, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Fake Dating, Mentions of Alcohol Abuse, Slow Burn, Soulmates, Southside Serpent Jughead Jones, soul marks, southside serpents, tropefest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 06:53:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20110948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunshinebunnie/pseuds/Sunshinebunnie
Summary: Since the appearance of the soul marks, happily ever after was no longer as simple as meeting someone and falling in love. Now, you had to get a soul mark, then you needed to find the person's whose mark matched yours...and then the marks needed to be activated. When Betty's best friend Veronica insists on Betty attending the Revealing Ceremony between she and her fiance, Archie Andrews, Betty needs to find someone to act as her boyfriend otherwise she risks jinxing Veronica and Archie's soul marks from activating. Unfortunately, the only person she can ask is the one person in Riverdale she can't stand: Jughead Jones.**A fake dating/enemies to lovers/soul marks AU**





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> First--a huge shoutout to the ever lovely jjonesin4 for encouraging me to write this! You're a-doll-able!!
> 
> Second--as per usual, this is unbeta'd so any and all errors are mine.
> 
> Third--I does things on the Tumblr from time to time...like post sneak peeks. 😇😇😇 Come find me @sunshinebunnie, if you want to find out more! 😊😊😊😊

“No! Absolutely not, Veronica. How many times must I tell you? I’m not going!” Betty was at her wits’ end as she pulled a face on the other end of the phone. 

“_ C’mon _ , B!” her best friend wheedled, “It’s one night. You _ know _ what a big deal Revealing Ceremonies are. I _ need _ you there!” 

The put upon blonde sighed heavily. “Why are you pushing this, V? You’ve had your soul mark since we were 16, and you said you’ve already seen his. What’s really going on?”

There was an uncharacteristically long silence on the other end of the line as Betty waited for her best friend’s response. Eventually, she heard the brunette say in a quiet whisper, “What if they don’t sync up? We’d be doomed to have a loveless marriage if we still went through with it.”

Betty shuddered. She and Veronica both had first hand experience with what could go wrong with soul marks. In Veronica’s case, her parents’ soul marks had matched, but never synced. Instead of transforming into vibrantly colored complementary tattoos, their marks had remained more like slightly translucent scars. For Betty’s parents, her mom had rejected the boy whose soul mark had matched hers, choosing instead to marry Betty’s father, despite the fact that he didn’t have a soul mark at all. 

Even though soul marks had been around for several generations, they hadn’t been well understood at the time their parents got married. It had taken several decades after the marks first appeared before people realized that marrying someone with a matching mark drastically reduced the likelihood of marriages dissolving because of infidelity. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until after Betty and Veronica were born that research proved having matching soul marks wasn’t enough. If the marks weren’t activated--or “synced”--even couples with matching soul marks were doomed to loveless marriages. The problem was, no one really understood how the soul marks did that. 

Hence, the rise of Revealing Ceremonies. Whether by luck or accident--Betty secretly believed it was really just a fortuitous accident--several years after she was born a couple’s soul marks had “activated” after performing a special ritual. When the same ritual had resulted in numerous other couples’ marks syncing, people began claiming that the ceremony was integral to activating the marks. Originally, people had included the rituals as part of their marriage ceremonies. Unfortunately, after several high profile cases where the soul marks had _ not _ synced during the ritual without explanation, people had started performing the ritual during the engagement process instead, so if the marks _ didn’t _ activate for some reason, the couple had the option of trying the ceremony again at a later date or just calling off their wedding. 

Despite the pomp and circumstance of the Revealing Ceremonies though, no one really knew what exactly caused them to _ work _, so, like many unexplainable things with high stakes, superstitions had taken root and run rampant. 

One of the only undisputed superstitions surrounding the Revealing Ceremony was that _ no one _ was allowed to be present if they were single. Although there weren’t any documented cases of one person’s soul mark matching with multiple people at the same time, since no one knew what caused soul marks to appear either, it had become generally accepted that it was best not to tempt fate by allowing unattached people to attend the activation ceremony. 

“I won’t let you down, V,” Betty found herself telling her nervous best friend. 

“Thank you, Betty!” Veronica squealed happily. 


	2. Me Without You Without Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After promising Veronica that she would attend her and Archie's Revealing Ceremony, Betty finds herself in dire need of someone to be her "significant other" for the event. With only a couple weeks to go, she is forced to turn to the last person anyone in Riverdale would suspect her of being involved with: Jughead Jones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First--thank you so much for taking the time to read! I greatly appreciate it!!
> 
> Second--this is unbeta'd. I am the sole owner of any and all errors.
> 
> Third--come play with me on Tumblr @sunshinebunnie! Sometimes I even do stuff like post upcoming sneak peeks...😊😊😊

Kevin walked into Betty’s office at Blue & Gold Publishing to see her repeatedly banging her head against her desk. With each dull _ thunk _, the reverberations through the creaky piece of second-hand furniture caused the red pens in her wire stationary organizer to rattle against the cheap metal. He winced in sympathy as she finally raised her head and he could clearly see a large, red splotch on her forehead from where her head met the desk. 

“I take it, you still haven’t found anyone to take to Veronica’s Revealing Ceremony next weekend?” he said sympathetically. 

She shot him such a dry look, he was mildly surprised that the water still left over in his bottle from lunch didn’t instantly evaporate. “_ No _ ,” she said shortly, “and I don’t need you telling me ‘I told you so’ either.” Betty gritted her teeth. She _ knew _\--months ago when Veronica first brought it up--that she shouldn’t have agreed. Sure, she hadn’t been dating anyone at the time, but she hadn’t imagined it was going to be a problem. Unfortunately, the guy Polly had tried setting her up with--Chuck--had been a total dud: a stereotypical “bro” that she had nothing in common with. She couldn’t ask Trevor in Accounting. Everyone knew he had a huge office crush on her, and she felt it would be too cruel to ask him to be her fake boyfriend to such a significant event. If not for the fact that everyone at the ceremony would know Kevin--and by extension, that he was gay--she would have asked her other best friend; however, things being what they were, Betty knew realistically that he wasn’t an option. 

Her head dropped on to her desk again. 

“You could always hire an escort,” Kevin said with an almost gleeful spitefulness.

Betty’s ponytail quivered as she grumbled into the dark wood of her desk, “_ Hard no _, Kev.” 

“What other options do you really have, Betty?” Kevin asked a little more gently. “It’s not like you have some secret treasure trove of single, straight men at your beck and call.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment before adding, “Although, if you do, and you’ve been holding out on me all this time, I don’t think we can be friends anymore.”

There was a low rumble from the woman crumpled on top of the ancient piece of office furniture. Kevin felt bad for Betty. His childhood best friend was faced with some unenviable choices. Unless she legitimately came down with something like mono the day of the Revealing Ceremony, there wasn’t any way for the poor blonde to beg off going without inviting Veronica’s wrath for abandoning her. Likewise, she couldn’t show up stag. Riverdale was a small town; everyone knew who had gotten their soul marks...and who hadn’t. Alice Cooper had gotten her soul mark at the notoriously young age of 15, so it hadn’t been a huge shock when Polly got hers at 17. But for Betty to be 26 and _ still _ unmarked? It had been the talk of Riverdale for quite some time. If she showed up at the ceremony without a significant other, and Veronica and Archie’s soul marks _ didn’t _ activate, everyone there would singularly blame her for their misfortune. 

“Ohhhh!” the young man said suddenly, a perfect, yet slightly unsavory idea occurring to him. Betty’s head popped up and the corners of her green eyes creased as she squinted suspiciously at him. He looked at her for a minute and weighed his next words carefully. “There is one person you could try,” his voice drifting off a little as he spoke. 

She stared at him and he gave her a meaningful look back. 

Betty violently recoiled as realization dawned on her. “You can’t be serious,” she sputtered. Kevin just gave her an apologetic shrug to which she replied, “Absolutely not, Kev!”

“Well, I have it from reliable sources that he is currently single,” the young man said thoughtfully. “Besides, if you show up with him, you know no one will question you about why they’re just hearing about your relationship.” 

As much as it killed her to admit it, she knew her best friend had a point. It was no secret that the editor-in-chief at Blue & Gold Publishing shared no affection for the true crime editor at Red & Black Publishing. Shortly after her tenure as the masthead editor began, a non-fiction manuscript she had approved for acquisition was mysteriously published by Riverdale’s rival crosstown independent printing house a month before the Blue & Gold’s scheduled release date. A nasty lawsuit had ensued, fanned in no small part by Alice Cooper’s animosity toward anything related to the Southside. By the time the two sides agreed to a settlement, the Northside and the Southside were practically at war. It had taken months for things in Riverdale to settle down, and for the sake of her own sanity (and the skin on her palms), Betty had banned any and all mention of anything related to Red & Black Publishing. 

Her shoulders sagged as she released a deep sigh. “Even if I _ was _ going to consider this idea, Kevin, and that’s a big _ if _, it’s not like he’d actually take my call if I just ring over to Red & Black.” 

“You’re probably right,” Kevin agreed before adding, “but it’d be a lot harder for him to ignore you if you ambush him at Pop’s.” 

Betty eyed her friend suspiciously before she probed, “Kevin, what do you know?”

* * *

  
Jughead had loved Pop’s ever since he was a kid growing up in the Sunnyside Trailer Park. It was one of the few places in Riverdale where he could remember going with his family where they didn’t get hostile looks for being from the Southside, or for their connections to the Serpents. Pop Tate always had a way of giving the Jones enough free food to feed an army without it coming across like it was charity. When the electricity got turned off to the trailer, or Gladys vanished without a trace, or FP hadn’t been sober in days, it was the one place in Riverdale where the young Jones man felt safe without question. Even when he went off to college at one of the smaller SUNY campuses, he still religiously came back to Pop’s whenever he needed to be reminded that he deserved to be in college as much as anyone else there. 

His favorite time of day to frequent the diner had to be the weekday witching hours between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. Aside from the occasional trucker or state trooper, the restaurant was nearly empty. All the upright citizens of Riverdale were in bed having to get up at a decent hour to get to work, while Riverdale’s children had no excuses to be out so late on school nights. Likewise, the Serpents generally spent their late nights at the Whyte Wyrm, the gang’s less than wholesome bar-cum-headquarters. 

He’d been steadily working his way through a second carafe of black coffee--a heavily marked up manuscript laid out on the table in front of him--when a shadow fell across the immaculate formica tabletop where he was sitting. Without bothering to glance up from a paragraph with several especially cringe-inducing typos, Jughead said genially, “I’m good on coffee for now, Marvel Ann, but thanks.” The shadow shifted for a moment as he turned his attention to the next page, a headache beginning to form directly behind his left eyeball as he immediately spotted a run-on sentence with multiple typos. He resisted the urge to tear the manuscript up. 

Working with Kurtz was a nightmare. If any other author turned in such sloppy work, the manuscript would have immediately found its way to the circular file. Unfortunately, the three other books Kurtz had previously published with Red & Black were all runaway successes that had more than recouped the advances the publishing house had extended to the eccentric author. Lazy _ enfant terrible _ though Kurtz was, Jughead was wise enough to know that any complaints he had about the strange other man would fall on deaf ears. He gritted his teeth and momentarily closed his eyes, silently counting to ten before bargaining with himself, ‘Just get to the end of this chapter, then you can spend the rest of the night working on your own book guilt free.’ 

When he reopened his eyes, the young man immediately noticed two things. First, there was a heaping plate of Pop’s signature chili cheese fries sitting in front of him where previously no such food had been. Secondly, a stunningly icy blonde was sitting primly across the booth. He scowled as he took stock of the woman in front of him. It had been years since he’d last seen the editor-in-chief at Blue & Gold Publishing--a feat rendered even more impressive by how small Riverdale was--but he recognized her instantly. Despite the lateness of the hour, her blonde ponytail didn’t have a hair out of place, and the white Oxford collar peeping out from her cadet blue cardigan with its perfectly polished faux mother-of-pearl buttons was immaculate. Everything about her gave off an image of perfection and he _ hated _ her for it. 

“Forsythe,” she said in a soft, clipped voice that told him she was trying to be on her best behavior.

“Elizabeth,” he replied curtly. She winced so subtly at the use of her first name that he almost thought he imagined it before he heard her say a little more heatedly, “No one except my mother calls me that.”

If it had been anyone else, he would have sympathized over having a name they didn’t want, but it was _ her _ , and the _ perfect _ Northside princess Elizabeth Cooper didn’t deserve any of his sympathy. Instead, he bit back, “And no one except _ your _ mother calls me Forsythe.” 

There was no mistaking the second wince she made as her shoulder jerked upward like she was bracing for him to hit her. Her reaction appalled him. While it was true that the Jones didn’t have the most pristine reputation in Riverdale, neither he nor his father were known for beating women, and the implied suggestion that he would suddenly start with her set his teeth on edge. (The one time he’d laid a hand on Penny Peabody didn’t count as far as he was concerned because he would’ve done the same exact thing to a man if he’d caught them trying to sell drugs to his twelve-year-old sister.)

He reached for one of the soggier chili cheese fries and shoved the greased up piece of potato in his mouth, chewing extra slowly as he contemplated the young woman in front of him. From what little he knew of Riverdale’s golden child, she was a in-bed-by-9-every-night-church-on-Sundays-didn’t-break-rules kind of woman. For her to be at Pop’s at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday sitting in his booth could only mean one thing: she was expressly looking for _ him _ , and if that was the case, then she _ needed _ something. He swallowed the french fry in his mouth and gave her a feral smile. He wasn’t entirely sure if the shiver that ran through her was from fear or desire, but a tiny part of him wanted it to be the latter. 

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want, Cooper, so I tell you ‘no’ already?” he said a little more snidely than he’d strictly intended. 

Whatever mousiness he presumed she possessed instantly vanished as she set her shoulders and sat up even straighter on her side of the booth, her icy words cutting through him like a hacksaw as she said, “I don’t _ want _ anything from you, Jones; however, I _ need _ to ask for a favor.” 

His eyes glittered. Jughead couldn’t credit either of his parents with much, but the one useful lesson they’d mutually instilled in him was the power of _ favors _\--especially favors involving people who had no desire to publicly associate with you. He meticulously wiped his hands on one of the crumpled up napkins already on the table before adjusting his grey beanie and sitting back on his side of the booth, arms spread wide like he was a magnanimous ruler holding court. Giving her a small nod, he prompted, “Go on.”

From where he was sitting, he couldn’t be sure, but it looked like she winced in pain for a moment as she appeared to ball up her hands before she gave him an exaggeratingly perky smile and said, “I need to attend the Revealing Ceremony for Veronica Lodge and Archie Andrews in two weeks.”

“And?” the unimpressed man asked when she didn’t elaborate.

Her nostrils temporarily flared as she huffed in exasperation before adding, “_ And _ I don’t have a significant other to go with me.” 

The wheels began to turn in his head, but he still wanted to hear her admit it, so he pressed again, “That sounds like a personal problem, Cooper.” 

He could practically hear her teeth grinding against one another as her jaw clenched before she gritted out, “I need someone to go with me as my fake boyfriend.”

The laugh that tore out of his mouth was more of a bark than a sound of mirth, and the harshness of the sound reverberated tauntingly around the nearly empty diner. “And by ‘someone’ what you really mean is, you need _ me _ to go as your fake boyfriend,” he said dryly after stillness returned to the restaurant. 

“Yes,” she reluctantly admitted as her eyes looked anywhere except at his face. 

His arms dropped to his sides as he contemplated what she was asking. This wasn’t just _ a _ favor she was asking for, it was just about the _ biggest _ favor she could ask, and the fact that she was asking _ him _ at all meant she had no other options. He’d spent years listening to his dad bemoan “Jones luck” and he’d honestly spent most of his life agreeing with his old man about it, but in this instance, he couldn’t help thinking that perhaps, for once, fate was finally shining down on him.

“Favors like that don’t come cheap,” he said after a few minutes of tense silence. 

When her eyes finally settled on his face, there was a darkness in her gaze that caught him slightly off-guard: it was a much deadlier look than he expected the Northside princess to have in her. Before he had a chance to think too much on it, the Hitchcock blonde in front of him said, “Then let’s talk terms,” her voice sounding half an octave deeper than it had previously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments/kudos/reblogs always appreciated! 
> 
> Again, thank you so much for sharing your time with me and my work!! You're awesome! 🤗🤗🤗


	3. You Can't Sit Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Betty and Jughead share their first "date," and Jughead accidentally learns some sensitive information about Betty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, as always, thank you so much for following along with this story! You're all amazing!!!
> 
> Second, still unbeta'd. Any and all errors are my own.
> 
> Third, in case you're new here, you can come finds me on the Tumblr @sunshinebunnie. I do things! (Like occasionally post sneak peeks...🤗🤗🤗)
> 
> Finally, comments/kudos/reblogs are always greatly, greatly appreciated!!

Jughead was beginning to regret agreeing to be Betty Cooper’s fake boyfriend. For a relationship that didn’t actually exist, he found he would be putting in more effort than he did in the handful of real relationships he had been in over the years. He’d originally assumed that all he needed to do was show up at the Revealing Ceremony and make nice with a bunch of judgmental Northsiders for a few hours until Veronica and Archie secured their happily-ever-after. Betty, however, had different plans. 

Since no one fully understood how the soul marks activated, Betty didn’t know how convincing their fake relationship needed to be. For Veronica’s sake, she wanted to err on the side of caution, so she’d insisted on them spending time together before the ceremony as part of their contract. In his mind, “spending time” had meant a couple coffees, maybe a lunch. As far as he was concerned, they only needed to spend as much time together as was needed for people not to immediately assume they reviled each other. From the excruciatingly detailed itinerary that had shown up in his inbox within an hour of her leaving him at Pop’s, he quickly realized his mistake. 

He’d actually been looking forward to their first coffee “date,” if for no other reason than he was handing over Kurtz’s dumpster fire of a manuscript to the prim blonde. One of his conditions (accompanied by an iron-clad non-disclosure agreement) had been that she had to ghost-edit a manuscript of his choosing without complaint. She’d viewed it as one of his least objectionable terms and had agreed readily enough. Jughead had honestly been a little shocked that she didn’t seem to consider the fact that the sea of red ink he’d been staring at when she approached his table might be the work he was trying to pawn off. 

They’d met up at the picnic benches outside Riverdale High--he’d brought the coffee at her insistence, but he’d showed up with the piece of apple pie on a last second whim since he could always eat. The Northside high school had always reminded him of those schools he’d see in the movies at the Twilight Drive-In: clean, sufficiently staffed, an astonishing lack of metal detectors. Basically everything Southside High wasn’t. He’d shown up five minutes late--not because he had a problem being punctual, but because of an instinctual Southside belief that if he spent any longer than absolutely necessary on the “other” side of town, they’d find a way to arrest him for _ something _. 

Even at a distance, she’d stood out--the silver sequins on her baby doll pink cardigan shone in the mid-afternoon sunlight like a plethora of tiny photographic light reflectors--a blonde and pink lighthouse stashed amid a patch of tidy, but institutional, concrete structures. She was staring intently at the school parking lot, her eyes periodically sweeping over toward the street whenever the sound of a car approached. Jughead had just smirked as he walked closer toward the table, his “girlfriend” completely oblivious to the fact he’d parked his bike on the opposite end of the football field to her left. 

“Cooper,” he said with an unapologetic grin when the notoriously poised blonde let out an ear-piercing shriek of surprise. He set down one of the cardboard go-cups he’d gotten at Pop’s in front of her along with the plastic clamshell with the pie before he straddled the picnic bench across the table from her. 

Betty glared at him even as her chest continued to heave from the surprise of being snuck-up on, and he made a concerted effort to keep his gaze glued to anything above her collar bone. He was well-acquainted with Northside bias having spent most of his life watching Alice Cooper paint Southsiders in general, but the Serpents more specifically (his father, FP, chief amongst them), as uncontrollable, wild, lascivious beasts looking to corrupt the minds and morals of any innocent Northside resident who happened to come upon them. When the pulse point in her neck stopped jackhammering around, he chanced another look at her face. While the disapproving glare was still noticeably in place, for a brief split second, he thought he saw a glimmer of surprise, or perhaps even disappointment, that he did not exude the infamously impressive Serpent libido. 

Before he had a chance to say anything else, the annoyed woman in front of him snipped, “I was expecting you at 2:45.”

His hackles immediately went up as he sniped back, “And I didn’t feel like potentially playing Twenty Questions with a school resource officer wondering what a Southsider was doing so far across town.”

The young woman huffed out a small breath, her shoulders sagging as if a couple of cement blocks had suddenly been hooked to her shoulder blades. As much as she wanted to deny it, his concerns were valid. Her glare morphed into a pinched smile as she reached for the cooling cup of coffee in front of her and popped open the black plastic vent hole, blowing a stream of air into the dark liquid inside the cup. Closing her eyes for a second, she seemed to steady herself before she recentered her gaze on his face and said somewhat sincerely, “Thank you. For meeting me here.”

Jughead simply shrugged as he opened up the takeout container with the pie, eagerly digging in with a deceptively sturdy white plastic fork. As he savored the buttery pie crust that Pop Tate made from scratch every day, the young man tried not to be a little unnerved by how intently Betty was watching his mouth as he chewed. He felt like he was a specimen being studied for one of the NatGeo videos his high school Biology teacher insisted on playing for them rather than actually teaching. To cover up his awkwardness, he shoved another heaping forkful of pie into his mouth before he was completely done chewing his first bite. 

A strange look passed over her face then, as if he had somehow broken an enchantment cast over her, and she said, “I was hoping we’d have more time to talk. I’m the moderator for Riverdale High’s student newspaper. Normally, I meet with the editor and a few of the staff writers on Tuesdays to check on their ideas for the week, and then I have a separate meeting with the editor alone on Thursdays to proof the final layout together.”

He nodded, mostly because it seemed like the reasonable thing to do, but also because he realized it was information someone who’d already been dating her for several months would probably know. Washing down the thoroughly masticated lump of apple pie mush in his mouth with a large swig of black coffee, Jughead parroted back, “Moderator. Student paper. Tuesday, Thursdays. Got it.” His eyes briefly dropped to the white plastic fork held precariously between her fingers almost as if she wasn’t quite sure how to use it. In a voice that was surprisingly less strained than he’d imagined, he found himself joking, “It’s just pie, Cooper, not a marriage proposal. As otherworldly as the pie from Pop’s is, I’m pretty sure eating it isn’t going to activate your soul mark.”

The bitterness in her voice caught him by surprise when the woman across from him muttered, “You can’t activate something you don’t have.”

Her green eyes abruptly shot to his face as she simultaneously realized what she’d unintentionally let slip, while he consciously worked to keep his face as neutral as possible. Even though the Northside and the Southside generally kept to themselves, some rumors occasionally managed to filter into the opposite sides of town--the tale of the unmarked Northside golden girl being one of the notable few. Jughead had never put much stock in the hearsay, mostly because it seemed _ too _ far fetched: by all accounts, Betty Cooper practically walked on water in Riverdale--for her not to have a soul mark already defied all reason. He probably would’ve kept on denying the truth behind the whispered gossip even in light of Betty’s accidental admission if not for one simple thing--the abject self-loathing rolling off her in unmistakable waves as if she was already preparing herself for some kind of automatic judgment from him for being “other,” being _ lesser _. 

Jughead held the comfortably warm cardboard coffee cup thoughtfully between his hands debating whether he should share his thoughts. On the one hand, he felt nearly positive that if their situations were reversed, she probably wouldn’t be kind enough to extend any sympathy toward him, although given _ his _ family’s reputation around Riverdale, he imagined he’d face significantly _ less _ stigma about it if he was still unmarked. On the other hand though, why should he play into the all-too-common stereotype Northsiders liked to believe about the Southside that they all looked for any opportunity to revel in the misery of Riverdale’s “elite.” Taking a deep sip of his coffee, he eventually said, “You’re lucky, you know?”

She cocked her head in disbelief as if she was waiting for a punchline at her expense, and he couldn’t help but smile as he continued, “I’m serious. When you meet someone, you can choose to be completely open to them because _ you just don’t know _ . Once you _ have _ a soul mark though, you invariably wind up playing the ‘I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours’ game only to have to decide if you just want to pass the time with someone you _ know _ you can’t have a future with.”

Betty’s skepticism slowly morphed into something closer to kinship as he continued to say, “I mean, what’s the point of investing time in someone when you know one of you will eventually walk away? All these people who talk about soul marks being wonderful don’t know what they’re talking about. Being marked is a curse.” 

They sat in tolerable silence, mutually absorbing the unintentional insights they had given the other into themselves. Eventually, Betty said with a small smirk, “Maybe I should encourage one of the staff writers on the school newspaper to champion your position?” 

It was Jughead’s turn to wince as he chafed against the implication that he was acting like a broody teenager. “I’m not really sure I want to resemble that remark,” he said dryly.

Betty let out a short, tinkling laugh as she replied, “Probably for the best. I can only imagine the furor that would cause with my mother at the Revealing Ceremony once she quote unquote found out my _ boyfriend _ was just using me to push radical ideas on Riverdale’s impressionable youth.”

Before he had a chance to comment further on Alice Cooper and her possible (probable?) reactions to learning her youngest child was “dating” a Southsider, and an avowed Southside Serpent to boot, the discordant sound of an electronic dismissal bell rang out across Riverdale High’s campus. A moment later students started streaming out of the building like people crowding the streets on V-E Day. The blonde woman sharing the picnic table with him gave him a look that on anyone else he would have thought of as wistful, but since she had no reason to feel so kindly toward him, he chalked the look more up to disappointment over not going over more of their backstory than she’d wanted to. “Well, it sounds like they’re playing my song,” she said as she finally started to get up from the table to head inside to her student charges. 

He gave her a perfunctory head nod as he dug his fork into the diminishing slice of pie, calling out to her as an afterthought, “Talk to you later, Betts,” as her back disappeared into the swarm of teenagers. It hadn’t been until he went to throw out the empty pie container that he realized: he never got around to turning over Kurtz’s damned manuscript. 


	4. I’ll Always Find You In The Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jughead ignores FP's warnings, Betty tries to blend in on the Southside, and Jughead and Betty have some misunderstandings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First and foremost--Thank you to each of you for taking the time to read my story! You're wonderful!! 
> 
> Second--I live life on the edge, so any and all errors are my own.
> 
> Third--TRIGGER WARNING--this chapter starts to get into Betty's self-harm (canon compliant) and mentions FP's alcohol dependence issues. If these are triggers for you, PLEASE CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED.
> 
> Fourth--I'm nice (I promise!). If you're curious about things like sneak peeks on my work and things like that, come find me in the Tumblr-dome @sunshinebunnie. 😊😊😊
> 
> Finally--comments/kudos/reblogs always appreciated!

His hand had been a quarter inch from pushing open the trailer door when he heard “Jug!” bellowed from the bathroom a moment before FP walked out partially wrapped in a dingy, threadbare orange terry cloth floor mat that doubled as one of their few bath towels. Fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds was all he’d needed to slip out of the trailer unnoticed, but his Jones luck reared its ugly head. He hadn’t exactly been dodging his father since he’d brokered his unorthodox “alliance” with Betty, but he hadn’t been in much of a hurry to run into the older Jones either.

As small as Riverdale was, it was inevitable that the Serpent leader would hear word of his son being seen around town with a woman. Hell, if he and Betty had only been seen together at Pop’s he doubted his father would’ve even said anything. While it hadn’t happened quite as frequently since Cheryl Blossom had unwittingly found herself sharing soul marks with Toni Topaz, it wasn’t entirely unheard of for the occasional Northsider to curl up in a snake nest from time to time, if only to have a story for their Northside friends about how “edgy” they were. No, the lecture he’d been surreptitiously avoiding was due entirely to the fact that he’d been spotted by a Serpent—Tall Boy—coming back from Riverdale High. 

Given that it had been the middle of the afternoon, Jug had assumed no one he knew would’ve seen him returning to work from the Northside. Even when he’d seen the man standing next to the lone motorcycle outside the Whyte Wyrm, he’d only vaguely registered the fact that he must be a Serpent. It was later that night when he’d met up with Sweet Pea for a beer and he caught sight of Tall Boy’s knowing leer that he realized the extent of his fuck-up. He’d wound up spending the night sleeping on Sweet Pea’s couch after convincing his best friend to leave the Wyrm early to go play video games. 

The only saving grace he could think of was that he was nearly positive no one on the Southside knew _who_ exactly he’d been meeting. Having to listen to FP “remind” (_warn_) him about getting mixed up with an anonymous Northsider he could handle. Dealing with the pure, apoplectic fury his father was sure to have if he knew the Northsider was _Alice Cooper’s daughter_ was a situation he wanted to avoid—preferably forever—especially since they weren’t _actually _dating. 

It was well known throughout Riverdale that there was no love lost between the leader of the Southside Serpents and the venomous editor/lead reporter for _ The Riverdale Register _ , although Jughead had never gotten more of an explanation from FP as to why beyond “She’s the _ worst _ kind of snake--one who betrays her own kind.” Shortly after he’d started at Red & Black Publishing, a copyright infringement dispute had broken out with Blue & Gold Publishing leading Alice to use _ The Register _ to go to war with nearly all of the Southside. When the first vitriolic article had come out, Jug had patiently listened to FP rant about “Alice Cooper’s hypocrisy” until his father eventually passed out at their small kitchen table. By the time Betty’s mom had published her tenth equally scathing piece about how the Serpents’ “insidious influence over the Southside was infecting the rest of Riverdale,” Jughead had decided to live out of his office at Red & Black rather than deal with any more nights of his father drunkenly throwing beer bottles at the walls of their trailer as he raged on against “the Terror of the Northside.”

“Dad?” the younger Jones said somewhat cautiously as his father watched him from his position halfway in and halfway out of the bathroom. 

“Going to the Wyrm?” FP asked with a casualness that instantly made his son suspicious. 

A part of him wanted to say “yes,” if for no other reason than he was already running late to meet Betty, again, and it would almost certainly save him from the speech he knew he was going to have to endure eventually. However, since a Serpent never showed cowardice, he stood a little bit straighter and said, “Wasn’t planning on it. I’m supposed to be meeting someone over at the Twilight.” 

An odd look passed over the older man’s face a moment before he said, “Oh. Someone I know?”

Jug was pretty confident his father had never met the youngest Cooper, so he felt safe saying, “Not that I know of.”

FP continued to watch him in that unnerving way he sometimes had before he asked a little warily, “Something serious?”

He struggled not to laugh; he knew FP was really asking about his mystery woman’s soul mark. When his own soul mark had appeared at sixteen, instead of getting a “birds and bees” talk like he’d halfway expected, the older Jones had hauled him down to the Whyte Wyrm--to get his first tattoo--along with a stern reminder to “forget you ever even saw that damn thing. Your Serpent tattoo is the only tattoo you ever need to worry about. Soul marks don’t mean shit. It’s worthless to chase after some pointless happy ending fairytale, boy.” 

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Jughead eventually said, trying to get out of the trailer without disrupting his father’s surprisingly zen mood. 

The older man nodded thoughtfully, the motion causing small water droplets to land on his cheeks as some of the excess liquid dripping off his shaggy wet locks flew on to his face. “Good,” he said. Jug had inched a little closer to the door when he heard FP add, “That’s real good. Last thing you need to be worried about is getting all sorts of mixed up over a Northsider.”

He immediately froze in place before replying a little stiffly, “I never said anything about her being from the Northside,” to which the older Jones let out a friendly-but-borderline-warning chuckle. 

“Jug,” his father said carefully, “I wasn’t born last night. You’ve been trying to sneak out of this trailer for the last twenty minutes. Now I know there’s no woman on the Southside you’d make that much effort not to be seen with. Only leaves someone from the Northside.”

For all FP’s faults, no one could honestly accuse him of being _ dumb _; if anything, his time in the Army had only honed his naturally strategic mind. A brief moment passed where the younger man contemplated trying to dissuade him of the notion he was involved with someone from the other side of Riverdale, but he ultimately decided against it. Betty was never going to have a reason to meet FP since they weren’t actually a couple, so it didn’t really matter whether he confirmed her connection to the Northside, or tried passing her off as being from Greendale or even Eastwick. In the end, Jughead simply gave his father a half shrug as he walked out the door. The busted screen door clattered shut so quickly behind him that the older Jones nearly missed his son mildly saying, “If it’s not serious, what does it matter?” 

  


The Twilight Drive-In wasn’t exactly full by the time he finally arrived, but he imagined that was to be expected for a Thursday night double feature so early in the summer. Even though he hadn’t worked the projectionist booth at the outdoor theater for the better part of twenty years, he was probably the only non-employee with any type of say in the movie line-ups. 

Early on in his sophomore year of high school, the town had attempted to shut down the drive-in citing “lack of profitability.” After his repeated efforts to convince the McCoy administration to change its mind failed, he’d done what he’d always excelled at: research. Every single day for nearly a week, he made his way over to Riverdale’s central public library and holed himself up with a microfiche machine until the librarians kicked him out for the night. He scoured old copies of _ The Register _ and _ The Greendale Lantern _ , even going through the less circulated _ Eastwick Chronicle _ , looking for anything he could use as the basis to petition for the Twilight’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. Jughead had been on the verge of accepting there was nothing he could do to save the outdoor movie theater when he’d found it: a quarter panel article in _ The Greendale Lantern _ from 1969 shortly after the Indian Civil Rights Act was passed that described a handful of remaining Uktena tribe members using the Twilight as the first official meeting place for the Serpents. Since the Twilight was on municipal property, under the ICRA they had a right to gather there without government interference--a right that the Sheriff’s Department had unsuccessfully attempted to dispute. Using the last seven dollars in his pocket, he’d printed out as many copies of the article as he could afford, then set about putting together his petition to the National Register. 

It had chafed Mayor McCoy no end to have to wait on a decision from the National Park Service before she could turn the drive-in’s prime real estate over to some land-hungry developers. A fact that she’d taken no pains to hide when she’d been forced into meeting with the young Serpent. When the NPS finally came back with its decision granting the Twilight’s petition for inclusion on the National Register, it had taken every single iota of willpower he had not to rub the mayor’s defeat in her face. 

Unfortunately, his victory turned into a double-edged sword. While he managed to save his job and sometime home, Mayor McCoy had voluntold him that she was appointing him as the official NPS-sanctioned docent for the site. He’d still been riding the euphoric wave of his victory when she’d called him into to her office to inform him of his new volunteer position, and he’d gone along with her decision without looking too closely at the details. It hadn’t been until the following month when the film reels he was expecting to arrive _ didn’t _ that the mayor had rather gleefully spelled out to him precisely what his position entailed: namely, being wholly responsible for the management and upkeep of the Twilight. He counted himself lucky that he hadn’t freaked out and had a full-on panic attack in her office.

Over the years, it had gotten easier. He’d learned to write grant proposals to secure funding from preservation trusts to cover maintenance and upgrade costs; and he’d been flooded with job applications from extracurricular-hungry Northsiders after he’d gotten word out about how good a volunteer position at a historic NPS-National-Register site would look on a college application. What he loved most of all though was the freedom he had to single-handedly decide on the movie selections. To scrape together the best chances of attendance, he’d grudgingly accepted the need to set aside the weekends for the latest big budget box office hit, but he’d carved out Thursdays for himself to show classic films, niche films, or anything else that tickled his fancy. 

As a reward for making his peace with showing a dialogue-and-plot-lite-explosive-heavy summer blockbuster for five days surrounding Memorial Day weekend, he’d set aside the following Thursday for a Hitchcock double feature. While he’d been racing over to the drive-in from Sunnyside Trailer Park, he’d mentally applauded his foresight in choosing a pair of movies whose complete credits had to run before the movies themselves started. Even though he was normally fanatical about making sure he got to the movies early enough that he didn’t miss any of the previews, he was pretty sure Betty Cooper didn’t know that about him. Since plenty of people considered themselves “on time” to the movies so long as they didn’t miss any of the _ actual _ movie, he felt pretty confident that he wasn’t going to get another lecture from the sanctimonious blonde about his punctuality or lack thereof. 

He found a space for his bike fairly easily and walked casually over to the concrete bleacher seating where they’d agreed to meet. His eyes scanned over the handful of cars that were dispersed amongst the speaker stands and he realized that he didn’t know what she drove. There’d been too many cars in the faculty lot at Riverdale High for him to venture a guess, and he’d been so caught off guard at Pop’s by her bizarre proposal that he hadn’t bothered looking for her ride when she’d headed off. Looking over the small collection of vehicles present for the double feature, Jug imagined Betty had shown up either in a neatly maintained white Toyota Corolla parked close to the half open snack shack, or in a dark blue Volvo station wagon with early signs of rusting near the rounded off edges of the car’s bumper. 

His eyes were flicking back and forth between the two most likely suspects when he happened to catch a brief glimpse of a high blonde ponytail slide out of the driver’s side of a meticulously restored black Shelby Cobra. Even without her iconic hairstyle, he knew Betty would’ve caught his attention between the bright red bandana she had tied around her head and the surprisingly formfitting denim overalls she was wearing. Once his momentary shock wore off though, a wave of anger fell over him that increased the closer she got. 

Her radiant smile wavered slightly as she registered the glower covering his entire face right as she heard him say, “The costume is a bit much, don’t you think, Cooper?”

Betty’s forehead scrunched up in confusion as she parroted, “Costume?”

Jughead waved vaguely at her outfit before he sarcastically replied, “What? You figure too many people would know you were from the Northside if you showed up in your normal Keds and a sweater set?”

For a brief split second, a hurt look passed through her eyes before she snapped back like an overly taut rubber band, “And here I was, thinking that the Serpent Prince wouldn’t want to broadcast to all of the Southside that he’s spending time with Alice Cooper’s daughter. Now I know. Maybe the next we hang out, we should meet up at the Whyte Wyrm. That’s where all you Serpents socialize, right? I’ll even invite my mom to chaperone. It’ll be _ fun _.” There was a nasty, unforgiving sneer in her voice when she said “fun” that oddly enough made him feel bad, like he’d inadvertently picked at a fresh scab. Even though he was the one doing her the favor, he couldn’t deny her point: him showing up in his Southside Serpent jacket at Riverdale High was a whole lot different than her broadcasting that she was Betty Cooper on the Southside—even in an otherwise neutral location like the Twilight. 

With a grudging nod, he said, “You’re right.” She gave him a hard look before he continued, “It was a good idea.”

Betty tentatively uncrossed her arms and sat down near Jughead, carefully leaving several inches of space between them.

“Thanks,” she said warily after a minute clearly expecting him to add a _ but _. 

Looking at her out of the corner of his eye, he asked genuinely curious, “Where’d you get the car?” 

A strange half-smile came over her face like she knew the punchline to a joke he hadn’t heard. When she still hadn’t answered several seconds later, he turned to face her better before asking in a voice lanced with mild panic, “_ Tell me _ you didn’t steal it.” When she didn’t immediately shoot down his suggestion, his heart rate ratcheted up until he began feeling lightheaded. FP had warned him his entire life that Alice Cooper was obsessed with destroying the Serpents, but he’d always taken the cautions with a grain of salt. Faced with the prospect that she’d orchestrated this whole ruse just to get him arrested for grand theft auto suddenly had Jughead wishing he’d taken his father’s ominous warnings more seriously. Before he had a chance to scramble away from the youngest Cooper though, he felt her hand pressing on his forearm as she looked at him with a surprising amount of concern for someone she was about to get falsely arrested. 

“Jug?” he heard the young woman say softly, her voice finally registering during a break in his abrupt panic fog. When he managed to focus his eyes on her face, he found himself reflecting on how much the backlighting from the movie screen made it look like she was wearing a twinkling halo. The thought brought him more comfort than he knew it should. 

He realized he was staring when Betty gave his arm a gentle squeeze as she asked, “You ok? It seemed like you went someplace for a minute.” Perhaps if she had been anyone else, he might’ve opted for the truth, but a few minutes of kindness wasn’t enough to overcome the mountain of distrust that was part of every Southsider’s DNA. Instead, he opted for a nod and a small cryptic smile. 

His response seemed to placate her well enough because she said, “Actually, my dad and I have been restoring the car since I was in high school. He gave it to me when I graduated from Bennington and told my parents I was moving home for a job at Blue & Gold.” 

There was really no reason for her to keep her hand on his arm, and even less of one for her to stroke the temptingly soft leather of his jacket with her thumb, but she found the act of mindlessly touching him to be oddly soothing. She was so distracted by the feel of the buttery material under her hand that she vaguely thought she heard him mutter something like “Must be nice,” but when she looked at his face, nothing she saw there suggested the comment was anything other than a figment of her imagination. Her fingers reflexively gripped his forearm a little tighter as she unconsciously leaned a fraction of an inch closer to him. Opening her mouth to ask Jughead a question, Betty found herself subtly huffing the rich, earthy spiciness that seemed to linger on his skin, which caused her to momentarily lose her train of thought. 

Jughead forced himself to look _ anywhere _ but at her face, or else he knew he was going to do something stupid--like kiss her. He’d long since stopped expecting her to remove her hand from his arm and had even begun to enjoy the constancy of the noticeable pressure: her presence somehow bringing a modicum of order to his scattershot thoughts. But then he’d sensed her leaning toward him, so he’d forced his attention away from her comforting grip on his jacket up to her face. It was a mistake. His mouth started to go dry as he took in the unfocused look in her eyes, her blown-out pupils all but obscuring the vibrant green of her irises. The more logical part of his brain tried shouting at him that lust had nothing to do it; her eyes were just naturally dilated in response to the fact they were sitting in the increasing darkness surrounding the drive-in. He imagined he probably could’ve even made peace with that explanation if not for his eyes dropping to her partially open lips as he simultaneously caught a brief whiff of strawberry that seemed to be clinging to her breath. The small, ancient lizard part of his brain that he was usually able to ignore flared to life as he found himself wondering if she’d taste like a strawberry milkshake from Pop’s. ‘ _ That _ wasn’t part of our deal,’ he reminded himself sternly, yanking his arm out of her grasp as he turned his complete attention to the flickering movie screen in front of them. He inwardly cringed when he saw Betty’s mouth snap shut out of the corner of his eye as whatever daze she was in instantly lifted after he forcefully moved his arm away from her touch. 

Her nostrils flared and her lips pursed tightly as her momentary fog lifted. Regardless of how romantic it might seem--sitting alone in the dark with a man she knew she shouldn’t be seen with whose presence was starting to make her skin tingle--she was not actually on a date with Jughead Jones. Betty’s mind scrambled for something _ safer _ to think about other than how strong his arms felt or whether his skin would taste spicy like the black pepper she could pick out in his cologne. Before she completely realized what she was saying, she heard herself blurting out, “I wrote an article on you.”

His head swiveled toward her with the type of painful slowness that always seemed highlighted in the B horror movies Reggie Mantle kept forcing all of them to watch in high school. A painful lump formed in her throat as her heart rate jumped up at the dangerous scowl etched on his face. 

“_ Excuse me _?” he growled quietly, a threat more than a little implied by the otherwise benign question.

Betty licked her lips slowly, silently wishing she had something—anything, really—to drink, to make up for the sand pit that her throat had suddenly become. Coughing twice in a staccato _ uh-ugh, uh-ugh _, her voice was more than a little gravelly when she eventually croaked out, “In high school.”

Jughead was so caught off guard by her admission that he managed to overlook the fact that her unintentional bedroom voice was getting him hard. His glower softened around the edges of his mouth as the menacing rage seeped into piqued curiosity. Her eyes dropped to his mouth for the briefest nanosecond before flicking guiltily back up to his face, and his cock throbbed as he watched her teeth gently sink into her bottom lip. “So, this article…” he prompted a couple minutes later, his voice unnecessarily soft given there was no one within one hundred feet of them. 

The young woman gave him a slightly embarrassed look. When she’d written the article on the Serpent Prince for the Riverdale High student paper, her sixteen-year-old self had never imagined he’d find out about it, let alone that she’d be the one to tell him. She swallowed one more time, then bit her lip again before admitting sheepishly, “It was about your efforts to save the Twilight.” He raised a questioning eyebrow. At the time, it had seemed like he was the only person in Riverdale who cared about the drive-in, so he found it hard to believe that Betty had secretly been championing his cause on the Northside. She added, “I was at the town council meeting when they passed the ordinance naming you the official docent for the Twilight Drive-In.”

Jughead’s eyebrows shot up. “They named a law after me?” he asked in confusion.

The young woman looked at him oddly. “The Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Third National Park Service Docent Act,” she said seriously, “Didn’t you know?”

He frowned. “Somehow it slipped Mayor McCoy’s mind to tell me,” he said dryly. 

It was Betty’s turn to frown. “But, haven’t you been running the Twilight this whole time?” she asked. 

“Yeah?” Jug answered with a small shrug.

“Well, how have you been paying for things? Tracking receipts? Budgeting?” she pressed.

“I’ve gotten really good at grant writing…?” his voice trailed off as if his answer should’ve been obvious.

Betty clenched her hands and for a split second, he thought he saw her wince, but any questions he might’ve had about it were lost when he heard her muttering a surprisingly colorful string of curses under her breath. He chuckled to himself. In the past week, he’d had more conversations with Betty Cooper--resident Riverdale golden child--than he’d had in the previous twenty-six years, and he’d come to one conclusion: “You’re an enigma, Cooper,” he mused. 

She gave him a small smile, a little mortified to have been caught ranting. “Sorry,” she said. Her eyes drifted over to the movie screen. “Are we still watching _ Rear Window _?” she asked after a couple minutes. 

Jughead’s eyes shifted from the column of her neck over toward the flickering light of the screen. “No, this is _ To Catch a Thief _,” he said.

The Cooper woman made an indistinguishable noise that he thought sounded a little like she said “appropriate.” He waited for her to keep speaking, taking note of the subtle similarities between the woman beside him and the woman who would eventually become Princess Grace. “Sometimes, I wonder if I missed my true calling. That I should’ve stuck with journalism rather than going into publishing, you know?” Betty finally said a little quietly. 

“Why didn’t you?” Jughead asked. 

Betty’s iconic ponytail bobbed as she tipped her head back to talk to the sky, saying with a sigh, “Honestly? I didn’t think I could deal with working with my mom every day.”

A warm, rumbling laugh washed over her as Jughead doubled over on the bleacher bench, and she was struck by how comfortable he seemed to be. It made a part of her wonder, if they’d met under different circumstances--in college, perhaps--would they have become friends? More than friends, even? As quickly as the charitable thought crossed her mind, it started dying when she heard the young Jones man asked though laughter-induced wheezes, “Why would you think working for _ The Riverdale Register _was your only option?” 

Betty glared at him in response, her lips setting into a thin, hard line. The sharp edges of her neatly manicures nails dug into the base of the fleshy mounds making up the heels of her thumbs. She kept her mind hyper-focused on the sharp stinging sensation in her hands to distract her from lashing out at the smug man sitting next to her. ‘As if he knew _ anything _about my life,’ she thought bitterly, ‘Must be nice to grow up with no one giving a damn about what the hell you do.’ 

She realized too late that her internal monologue had not been entirely _ internal _ when Jughead stared through her with such dead eyes that her skin broke out in goosebumps. “Jug!” Betty tried backtracking, “I didn’t mean…” 

Jughead abruptly cut her off. “_ Don’t _ ,” he said icily. “Don’t embarrass yourself, Betty, by pretending that you suddenly think Southsiders--Serpents--are people because _ clearly _ that’s not true.” He pushed himself off the bleacher seat and stalked over toward his bike, gravel crunching under his boots the entire way. Swinging his leg over the seat, he whipped off his beanie and jammed his helmet on, tucking his beloved knit hat away in his saddlebag. Turning slightly, he could just about make out that Betty’s mouth was moving, but between his idling engine, his snugly fitted helmet, and his closer proximity to the movie screen, he couldn’t tell a word she was saying. As he stored his kickstand and started rolling his bike out of its spot though, Jughead found himself wishing it was just as easy to ignore FP’s voice in his head saying, “ _ I warned you about those Northside girls. _” Tearing out of the Twilight, he found himself heading toward the Wyrm. He only hoped he didn’t have to hear FP’s I-told-you-so in real life too. 


	5. Why'd It Have To Be Snakes?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betty regrets some impetuous words and makes some impetuous choices while Jughead confronts some uncomfortable truths and has some uncomfortable questions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First--THANK YOU ALL (as always) for reading! You're all amazing. Thank you so much for sharing your precious time with me.
> 
> Second--unbeta'd. You know the drill. 😁😁
> 
> Third--come hit me up on Tumblr if you're so inclined! @sunshinebunnie
> 
> Finally--Comments/kudos/reblogs always appreciated!

Kevin cringed as Betty stabbed her strawberry milkshake with a particularly vicious jab of her straw. From the way she kept muttering about wearing “a stupid beanie in eighty degree heat,” he had a good idea who his best friend was imagining. 

“Everything ok, Betty?” Kevin asked carefully as he slid into the booth across from the agitated blonde. His friend’s unimpressed eye roll spoke volumes. Folding his hands on the Formica tabletop, he leaned a fraction of an inch closer and took a fortifying breath before asking, “What happened?” 

Betty’s hands flew up so suddenly he was astonished that her milkshake didn’t get completely upended all over the table. Her fingers mesmerized him as they danced wildly through the air, her gesticulations getting increasingly animated with each passing second. He was so swept up in her spectacular rant that he noticed the blonde’s elbow flying toward his Coke a minute too late. A second later, his loud screech rang out through the diner as his three-quarters full glass clattered loudly on to the table ice and soda spilling everywhere. Kevin shot up as quickly as he could manage within the confines of the booth, his stonewashed chinos barely escaping unscathed from the sticky caramel-colored liquid. His lips pursed in annoyed disapproval as Betty apologetically righted the glass and began the unenviable task of trying to sop up the lake of soda on the table with every available napkin she could grab. 

A thick stack of soggy napkins and a refilled soda later, Kevin was still glaring at Betty, his earlier indulgent mood ruined by the avoidable accident. Betty was just about to suck in another stream of air to sound off over her outrage at the Serpent Prince’s behavior, when the Northside young man cut her off with the palm of his hand. 

“Betty Cooper,” he said sternly, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

The blonde gaped at the unexpected chastisement. Content that he had her attention, the young Keller man continued, “Look, you have two choices. Tell Veronica that you can’t go to her Revealing Ceremony because you’re still single, and risk everything it entails when people disappoint the Lodges. Or, suck it up, make peace with Jughead, and keep Veronica happy by being sufficiently locked down to attend the ceremony. Either way, accept responsibility for the fact that _ you _ put yourself in this situation.”

The affronted blonde started to splutter, “_ Kev _…,” before the young man cut her off. 

“No, Betty,” he said. “I’ve spent the last half an hour listening to you bemoan how Jughead left you at the Twilight after you--yes, I know--_ accidentally _ insulted him. But the fact is, you _ did _ insult him. He’s a Serpent, and not just any Serpent, the Serpent Prince. He doesn’t _ have _ to be nice to you.”

Betty stared at her friend as she slowly processed the unexpected dressing down he’d given her. After a minute, she asked smartly, “Any more advice on what I’m doing wrong with my life?”

Kevin reached over and patted her arm. “Oh, Betty,” he said with a mildly sarcastic smile, “I’m not sure I have enough time to go over that list with you.” She returned his friendly condescension with a cheeky smile of her own even as she sighed heavily on the inside. As much as she wished it weren’t true, her friend was right: she needed Jughead, while he could leave her to twist and be no worse off than he already was. 

Turning a sly look toward her friend, she said silkily, “_ Kevin _.”

His gaze immediately turned suspicious as her hands moved to grip his in a friendly I’m-going-to-hold-you-hostage-until-you-agree way. Ducking her head to the side, she gave him an impish grin as she said, “I need an excuse to go to the Whyte Wyrm.”

Kevin immediately attempted to recoil, but Betty’s fingernails dug painfully into the flesh of his fingers as he strained away from her. “_ Excuse me _? You need an excuse to do what now?” he squawked. 

She shot him a blinding grin--the same look she’d been using to get her way since she was five years old--and said, “The Whyte Wyrm, Kev. I’m nearly positive that’s where he went. Obviously, I can’t really show up there by myself, but if _ another _ Northsider was going and I just happened to tag along…” Her voice trailed off as she let the implication of her statement sink in. 

The young man gawped at his friend. In all his years of knowing her, Betty had done some impressively ballsy and/or stupid things: broken into Riverdale High on multiple occasions, lied to law enforcement (ok, it was his dad, but he was the Sheriff, so it still counted!), and defied Alice Cooper more times than he could count, but going to the Whyte Wyrm was inviting a level of trouble that she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. He shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. I’m not doing it, Betty.”

Betty gripped his hands a little tighter. “You said it yourself, Kevin. I need to go make nice with the Serpent Prince, and I don’t have the time to stakeout Pop’s waiting to ambush him the next time he comes in. _ You _ know Serpents, so I need you to be my excuse for going to the Wyrm to look for him.”

“He might not even be there!” the young man tried to reason to no avail. His shoulders hadn’t even finished sagging in defeat before Betty released her punishing hold on him, clapping wildly as she began sliding out of the booth.

“I’ll drive,” she said with a grin.

* * *

He stalked around the pool table again, hoping maybe this time he’d see a move that eluded him the previous three times he’d done it. “Get on with it, Jones,” Sweet Pea taunted from a table near his left. Jughead gritted his teeth, and took his shot, sinking one of the other man’s balls as the cue ball banked wildly off a side rail. His best friend hooted gleefully as Jug shoved his pool cue at the other man. 

Nothing about his night could get worse. 

The ride from the Twilight to the Wyrm wasn’t normally a long one, but he’d wound up cruising around the Southside for a while before he found himself heading toward the Serpent bar. Despite his best intentions, the drive had done little to dispel his troubled thoughts about Betty Cooper. By all accounts, Betty was about as Northside as it got: stable job, stable family (even if it did include Alice Cooper), stable home. Even her bias was classically Northside. Those parts of her he understood. But...she’d admitted that she wasn’t soul marked, and seemed righteously indignant about how Mayor McCoy foisted responsibility for the Twilight on him, which seemed to go beyond what was required to sell their fake “relationship” to her fellow Northsiders. Most confusing of all though was how she’d been touching him, looking at him. He’d seen enough of Riverdale’s “rebellious” youth fawn over Sweet Pea when they were teenagers to have a good idea of what Northside thrill seeking looked like, and Betty didn’t fit the mold. 

Sure, the lingering touches and the shy glances might be the same, but with her, he felt like they were actually directed toward _ him _—not just generically toward whatever warm body was wearing the Serpent jacket. 

“You look like you could use a drink,” a mild voice said from behind him. 

He spun quickly on his heel ready to tell the owner of the voice to mind their own business when he found himself face to face with a concerned-looking Toni Topaz. His agitation deflated almost immediately as Toni’s warm eyes continued to study him. “Or some air?” she eventually suggested with a small half shrug.

Jughead gave her a small nod before patting Fangs on the shoulder, saying “Game’s yours,” as he headed toward the doors to the parking lot. Fangs dipped his head in a vague acknowledgment even as his eyes stayed glued to the text message he was rapidly tapping out on his phone. Neither of the other two young Serpents walking out of the bar noticed when Fangs’ head frantically popped up from reading the latest message in his text chain. 

Even though he had longer legs, Jug found Toni still beat him to the front door, her petite size helping her skirt around the larger groups of Serpents standing around in the middle of the bar’s floor like pinball bumpers. “After you, Jones,” she said, her pink hair swinging to the side as she pushed the bar’s grimey wooden door open with a flourish. He raised his hand to the brim of his beanie in a sarcastic salute, earning a tinkling laugh from his friend as he stepped passed her into the humid June night air. 

Leaning against the clapboard siding, Jughead took a minute to close his eyes and enjoy a deep calming breath. ‘Leaving Betty at the Twilight was the right decision,’ he told himself even as the phantom image of a feisty green-eyed blonde in a red bandana flickered behind his eye lids. Although he’d made a deal with her, their arrangement had been predicated on their mutual understanding that they weren’t friends, and there certainly wasn’t any kind of legitimate attraction between them. Him getting hard up over the fact that she petted him like a dog and she didn’t seem like every other Northsider he’d ever come in contact with was not going to end well—for _ either _ of them. Other than having to get back Kurtz’s manuscript—a loss Jughead was _ almost _ willing to eat—backing out of their deal wasn’t going to cost him anything beyond a few hours of his time and a few cold showers for the foreseeable future. 

He opened his eyes and looked out over the collection of motorcycles and muscle cars parked outside the Wyrm. The familiarity of the sight helped calm his nerves even as he reached in his jacket pocket for his crush-proof pack of cigarettes. Jughead had the cigarette halfway out of the box when Toni’s voice rang out, “That’s a bad habit.” 

He shot her a sardonic grin as he popped the cigarette between his lips. “So is following in FP’s footsteps, but I keep doing that too,” he replied with a shrug. 

Toni let out a rich laugh as she sat down casually on the back of Sweet Pea’s bike, careful not to disturb either of his hand-tooled leather saddle bags. Jughead took a deep drag of his cigarette, letting the nicotine fill his lungs before he blew out a long stream of smoke through his nose. His eyes swept back over the parking lot taking note of how many Serpents managed to cram into the bar, astonished at how his father had managed to build up the biker gang into such a vibrant community. When he looked back over at his friend, she’d pushed her leather jacket halfway off her shoulders so that she didn’t overheat in the hot, moist night air. A vibrantly colored tattoo of a blossoming vine covered in tea roses twisted from her shoulder over and around the entire left side of her collar bone. 

“No Cheryl tonight?” he asked when he was halfway through his cigarette.

Toni shook her head. “Jason’s home for the week on some Blossom family business, so she’s been trying to get as much time in with him before he leaves again,” she said with a shrug. Jug nodded. While he wouldn’t say that he shared much in common with the flame-haired woman, he could at least appreciate her desire to spend as much time as possible with a sibling she hardly got to see: he felt the same way on the few occasions when Jellybean decided to come back to Riverdale to visit. 

His eyes flicked subconsciously back to her soul mark. He remembered when she’d first gotten it, before it activated. She’d shown up at his trailer in the middle of the night, tossing pebbles against his window as quietly as she could manage until he finally woke up and let her in. Her uncle had kicked her out at the ripe age of seventeen after hearing a rumor that she’d been spotted making out with a girl over at the quarry. All she’d had with her other than the clothes she was wearing was her 35mm kodachrome camera and a surprisingly sturdy hemp knapsack with the few other pieces of clothing she owned and a beat-up copy of _ In Cold Blood _ that she’d gotten from the discard pile at the Riverdale Public Library for a quarter. He’d grabbed a spare t-shirt out of his drawer so she had something to sleep in, and had started to turn away to give her some privacy when she’d hissed, “What the fuck?!” Jug had turned around only to see Toni craning her head this way and that to look at the shiny spidery tendrils curling around her collar bone like she gotten caught out in No Man’s Land. “At least yours looks cool,” he’d told her after she’d finished pulling on the t-shirt, “Mine looks like someone burned me with a weird fork.” She’d given him an impishly relieved grin in return as she’d joked, “Is this the part where I say ‘Since I showed you mine, you show me yours?’” 

If someone had told him back then that her unfinished barbwire-looking soul mark would transform into a vibrant floral tattoo, he never would’ve believed them. After Cheryl had activated Toni’s soul mark though, the tattoo that had mystically replaced the silvery-looking scar made sense. The flowers seemed to be reference to Cheryl being a Blossom, while the fact they were _ tea _ roses appeared to stem from Toni’s initials. Even the tiny thorns that had sprung up in the tattoo appeared to have evolved from the implied barbwire barbs in Toni’s unactivated soul mark. 

Despite FP’s admonitions not to worry about his soul mark, from time to time when he was younger, Jughead had found himself wondering how his own oddly shaped mark might transform to reflect the connection with his own soulmate. 

As he debated whether he wanted another cigarette, he felt his friend’s brown eyes probing him, searching for the right opportunity to speak. He flicked his lighter restlessly, the metal covering snapping open and closed with an oddly rhythmic _ snip snap TING _. The tension from Toni’s unasked questions built until he was on the verge of shouting at her to spit out whatever she wanted to ask when she beat him to it with a “Something bothering you, Jughead? You’ve been looking more morose than usual ever since you arrived tonight.” 

The lighter clicked closed with a sharp _ twang _ as he released a deep sigh. Of all the people he could possibly talk to about his disquiet over Betty Cooper, Toni was perhaps both the most qualified and most terrifying option. He had found out about Toni and Cheryl’s relationship by pure accident their senior year of high school when FP had come down with a case of the flu and he’d been dispatched to Thornhill to deliver a package to Clifford Blossom instead. FP had told him not to expect anyone to be around and that he should just let himself in to the kitchen to leave the package in the dining room. When he’d gotten to the Blossom estate, the back door to the kitchen was unlocked like FP predicted; however, the house had _ not _ been empty. Instead, as he’d wandered from the kitchen to the dining room, he’d passed by the ajar door of an overstock closet only to glance over and see Cheryl Blossom enthusiastically going down on his best friend while Toni had remained pressed up against a column of shelving lined with everything from homemade jellies to industrial-sized boxes of Kix cereal. Between Clifford and Penelope Blossom’s antiquated thoughts on their daughter’s sexuality, and the generally complicated reputations of both the Blossoms and the Serpents, Toni and Cheryl had wisely decided to keep their relationship on the quiet side. While he acknowledged that he and Betty’s situation wasn’t precisely similar--namely because they weren’t _ actually _ dating--he imagined that Toni, out of all his friends, could at least appreciate the theoretically tricky position he found himself in getting mixed up with Betty Cooper in the first place. 

It was also why he was terrified of talking to Toni. Toni’s vibrant activated soul mark was a mocking reminder that the soul marks didn’t care about who society said you _ ought _ to be tied to. Without seeing her naked, Jughead had to take it on faith that Betty hadn’t lied to him about not having her soul mark yet, but if it _ was _ true...His mind went unbidden to the thought that had been plaguing him as he’d ridden aimlessly around the Southside: _ could she be _ ** _the one_ **? 

Out of respect for their long-standing friendship, Jughead had honored Toni’s privacy for the better part of ten years, never pestering her about how her and Cheryl wound up activating their soul marks. That wasn’t to say that he hadn’t heard the story she’d told FP, and later all the Serpents, and later still Sweet Pea in private, about how it had “just happened” and she didn’t know how. On the off chance that Betty was lying about her soul mark, he _ needed _ to know--needed to know if soul marks could be activated _ without _ a Revealing Ceremony--because if that was true, it gave him even more of a reason to potentially avoid Betty. The Serpent Prince inadvertently finding himself soul-bonded to the daughter of the scourge of the Southside was not something he—or Riverdale for that matter—needed.

Right as he was on the verge of opening his mouth to ask, Fangs came flying out of the Whyte Wyrm, Sweet Pea hot on his tail. The shorter man skidded to a halt in front of Jug and Toni and said through a series of broken pants, “Jug...you...need to leave...right now.” Jughead gave the pink-haired woman a skeptical look as she turned to Sweet Pea and asked, “What’s he talking about?”

Sweet Pea’s mouth was hanging half open, midway through formulating his response to Toni’s question, when Jughead’s eyes were irresistibly drawn to a sleek black car pulling into the parking of the Wyrm: a black car he’d seen earlier that evening. There was a rushing sound in his ears as he fought to turn his attention back to Fangs and Sweet Pea, hoping against hope that the Shelby Cobra was either a figment of his overactive imagination, or even more improbably, belonged to a Serpent he didn’t know. He knew he was wrong on both counts when Toni’s whispered “_ Oh shit! _ ” registered in his brain with the slowness of something sinking in a vat of the Blossom family’s signature maple syrup. His eyes landed on Fangs, who gave him such an apologetic kicked puppy look that he knew Betty’s arrival had not been entirely unannounced. Before he had a chance to lash out at the other man though, Jughead heard a vaguely familiar voice saying, “Hi, Fangs,” with the sort of forced cheerfulness that hostages in movies seemed to exude to let those around them know _ I-had-no-part-in-this-everything-is-not-alright-PLEASE-SEND-HELP! _

All the way on the drive over from Pop’s, Betty had been telling herself that this was a perfect plan. She’d find (“_ ambush _”) Jughead at the Whyte Wyrm, in an environment where he felt comfortable, so he’d be more receptive to her attempts to apologize for her unintentional insult. Plus, as an added bonus, she’d have Kevin with her for emotional support in case Jug still turned down her peacekeeping overtures. However, now that she found herself standing in the bar’s parking lot with four pairs of shocked Serpent eyes staring at her, she was beginning to question the optimism underpinning her plan. 

The longer Jughead and the three other Serpents stared at her, the more she felt her skin tingle with nervous anticipation. Even though it wasn’t her intention to draw attention to the fact that she knew Jughead, Betty found herself unable to look away from his captivating blue eyes as she gave the small group of Serpents a little wave and a quiet “Hi.” There was a small quaver in her voice as the lone syllable left her mouth, and she hated the weakness and uncertainty it made her feel--like she had a reason to be ashamed. 

She was still staring at Jughead when she heard Sweet Pea’s incredulous voice begin to ask, “Isn’t that…” when suddenly an older voice broke out, “WHAT IS _ SHE _ DOING HERE?” Her attention turned abruptly to the source of the irate voice only to see FP Jones flying out of the front doors of the Whyte Wyrm, an exceptionally tall Serpent she didn’t recognize trailing after him with a malevolent shit-eating grin splashed across his face. Betty cringed. Intellectually, she’d known there was a risk that she’d run into her mother’s archnemesis by going to the gang’s headquarters, but it was one she’d glossed over as she’d imagined simply showing up, immediately finding Jughead by himself, and then stealing him away to a corner to talk all before anyone saw her or missed him. Her mind was still trying to convince her about the reasonableness of her plan when a cacophony of voices hit her brain at the same time as Kevin, Fangs, Sweet Pea, and Toni started speaking simultaneously. 

Betty’s eyes briefly swept from FP back to his son. Although outwardly Jughead appeared to be completely engaged in the explanatory verbal brawl being put on by their friends, there was a tension in his crossed arms that made her believe that he wanted to watch her reaction as badly as she wanted to see his. Before she had a chance to second-guess herself, Betty piped up, “I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”

Seven faces immediately locked on her with varying degrees of shock, distrust, and curiosity. Shooting Toni a quick glance that she hoped the other woman recognized as a plea for solidarity, Betty added, “I was hoping to catch up with Toni about planning a surprise party for my cousin’s birthday. I lost her number when I changed phones recently, and I couldn’t ask Cheryl without raising her suspicions, so…” Her eyes darted to Kevin. “I asked Kevin to talk to Fangs to see if she was around.” FP turned the full power of his intensity on the young Serpent as he challenged, “Is that so, Fogarty?” If not for the fact that she had no doubt the hawk-eyed older man would’ve picked up on it and instantly seen through her deception, Betty would’ve crossed her fingers that Fangs wouldn’t blow her cover. Instead, she breathed a quiet sigh of relief when the nervous boy nodded mutely while Kevin chirped, “Yep!”

FP turned his hard stare on the pink haired young woman, who returned the look with a dry, unimpressed one of her own. When it became apparent that Toni wasn’t going to crack under his intense scrutiny, the older Jones said gruffly, “You need to speak to _ her _ , you do it at Thornhill, understand, Topaz?” Toni gave him what amounted to the casual approximation of a salute, eliciting an indulgent smirk from FP. Before turning to go back in the bar, the Serpent King looked at his son, studying him cryptically before he said quietly, “You give her and Toni _ five _ minutes. Then I want all of you back inside the Wyrm, and her off the premises.” The deep scowl that had settled on to Jughead’s face with each word out of Betty’s mouth deepened further still as he hissed back, “Understood,” clapping his father on the back once he finally walked passed him. 

As soon as Jughead was confident neither FP nor Tall Boy were suddenly going to come storming back out of the Wyrm, he stomped over to Betty and spat out, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” The blonde flinched at the harshness in his words, and for a brief second, he felt bad; however, the charitable sentiment was short-lived. A flicker of movement to his left caught his attention, and he craned his head only to see Toni openly staring at him, while Sweet Pea, Fangs, and Fangs’ on-and-off Northside boyfriend Kevin clustered under the bar’s outdoor awning trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. He turned his full attention back to Betty, furiously grabbing her hand, and dragged her across the parking lot to where she’d parked her car. It wasn’t much of an improvement as far as privacy was concerned, but as long as they didn’t shout there was at least a better chance that their friends wouldn’t hear every word they said. 

Once they were safely ensconced beside her car, Jughead dropped Betty’s hand and demanded again, “Are you out of your mind? What the hell were you thinking, coming _ here _?” 

Betty gave him a deadly glare of her own as she rubbed the fingers he’d mercilessly crushed in his grip during their forced march across the lot. Leaning against the door of her car, she said with equal ferocity, “Is this how you treat everyone who tries to apologize to you?”

Jughead scoffed—the idea of any Northsider, let alone Alice Cooper’s daughter, venturing to the Southside to apologize to a Serpent strained every ounce of credulity he possessed. Betty squared her shoulders back as she crossed her arms, the motion accentuating the swell of her breasts under the bib of the denim overalls. The motion caused his eyes to automatically drop from her face as they instinctually tracked her hands, which caused his brain to take a half second longer than normal to process her saying, “You’re an arrogant jackass, Jughead.” Because of the split second delay, his brain and his body were still warring for temporary dominance over his mouth when Betty’s voice continued saying, “But that’s no excuse for what I said earlier, about no one caring about you. It was cruel and bitchy, and had far more to do with my mom than anything related to you. I’m sorry, Jughead.” 

Whatever cutting, pithy comment he was going to make evaporated from his thoughts as he recognized the sincerity in her comments, making him feel even worse about succumbing to the knee-jerk reaction to abandon her at the Twilight in a huff, rather than hearing her out in the first place. He toyed absently with his beanie as the comfortable silence between them began to morph into awkwardness as they kept standing next to Betty’s car, neither of them sure what their next move should be. Jughead glanced over toward the Wyrm and scowled a little when he noticed all of his friends had given up any pretense of pretending they weren’t interested in his conversation with Betty. Without taking his eyes off the small cluster of Serpents crowded next to Sweet Pea’s bike, he said to her, “You know, you never did answer my question. What possessed you to come to the Wyrm? Given your mom’s reputation, you had to know you weren’t going to get a warm welcome.”

Betty gave a small shrug even as she squeezed her arms around herself a little tighter. “Time is a luxury I don’t exactly have right now. Since I had to at least try to make peace with you as quickly as I could, I figured the best chance I had to run into you was here,” she eventually said. 

Jughead nodded. Her logic was sound, although if he was being completely honest with himself, despite his tantrum, he probably would’ve still gone to the Revealing Ceremony with her, if only for the selfish fact that he had zero desire to finish editing Kurtz’s god-awful manuscript. He backed a little away from her, preparing to return to his friends, when he said out of the blue, “You know, in a different life, you probably would’ve made a good Serpent, Cooper.”

The young woman stopped him with a questioning smirk as she replied, “Oh really? Why’s that?”

He grinned at her in return. “The first law,” he said matter-of-factly, “A Serpent never shows cowardice.”

Her sparkling laughter washed over them as she said, “Oh, Jug! I’m not sure I’m as brave as you think. I mean, I hardly think I’m as brave as Cheryl,” and he found himself overcome with the most overwhelming desire to hear her laugh like that as frequently as he could. 

Without giving it too much thought, he said glibly, “Cheryl’s insane. I’m not sure that’s quite the same thing as being brave.” The clear sound of Betty’s laughter surrounded him again and he smiled, an unexpectedly carefree sense of happiness suffusing his chest at the sound. He stepped a little further back as she turned toward her car door, cracking it open before she hesitated. “What is it, Betty?” he asked when she kept standing between her car and the door a fraction longer than necessary.

She turned her head back over her shoulder to look at him, her teeth digging into her bottom lip as if she was debating something. Her eyes drifted toward his mouth before immediately flicking back up to his darkened blue eyes. He watched her swallow carefully as some internal struggle skirmished in her head before he finally heard her whisper so softly that he thought he misunderstood her, “Text me when you get home?”

“Yeah,” he answered distractedly, to which Betty gave him a short nod before her blonde ponytail ducked inside her car and the door shut with a sharp snap. The Shelby Cobra’s well-tuned engine purred as the blonde slowly backed out of her parking space. She carefully executed a three-point turn in the parking lot so that as she pulled up to the front doors of the Wyrm, she was close enough for Kevin to hear her when she checked if he was going home with her. Jughead tried to contain the grin threatening to erupt across his face when her friend opted to stay behind with the Serpents. Although he knew there were a million reasons for him not to care, he couldn’t deny one basic fact: he was beginning to find himself increasingly attracted to her, and he was looking forward to talking to her soon without the threat of prying eyes. 


	6. We Agreed No Questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betty and Jughead have some interesting discussions with Alice and FP about being soul bound. Betty gets some big news, while Jughead learns the truth about Toni and Cheryl activating each other's soul marks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First--THANK YOU to each and every one of you for taking the time to read this story! You're amazing!!
> 
> Second--as usual, this is unbeta'd, so any errors are mine.
> 
> Third--if you're game, feel free to come find me on Tumblr! @sunshinebunnie. Sometimes I do things, like post sneak peeks!
> 
> Finally--comments/kudos/reblogs/fic recs are always super, super appreciated!

The clock embedded in her dashboard read 11:30 by the time she pulled into her driveway on Elm Street, and she was thankful that she’d finally broken Alice of the habit of waiting up for her in the living room. Although she loved her mom, Betty wasn’t entirely sure she was up for being interrogated when she needed to get up in seven hours to get ready for work. Taking stock of the fact that all of the lights in the house were dark, she cut the car engine as quietly as possible before exiting the car and closing the driver’s side door with a soft  _ click _ . 

Pushing open the front door, she was struck by an odd silence that seemed to have settled over the first floor, and it set her nerves on high alert. Casting her eyes around quickly, she searched for anything that looked out of place only to make out a misshapen lump obscured by shadows that appeared to be hunched over the dining room table. 

As she crept closer to investigate, Betty secretly lamented that she’d left her purse upstairs in her room when she’d gone out as her pocket-sized can of bear repellent was safely tucked inside it. The closer she got to the dining room, the more she realized that the lump was... _ whimpering _ . She inched a little further forward until her hand was within reach of the light switch controlling the chandelier above the table, and she hastily hit the cream-colored plastic, bathing the room in a soft 60 watt glow. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the light, Betty gradually realized that the lump was actually her mother, wrapped up haphazardly in a fluffy bathrobe, hunched over a tub of maple swirl ice cream.

“Mom?” she said trying to keep her incredulity to a minimum. “What are you doing sitting in the dark? Is everything ok?”

Alice sniffled before dabbing her eyes with a crumpled up tissue she’d been holding in the same hand as her spoon. Shaking her head, she inhaled a raspy breath then said, “I kicked your father out.” 

Betty stopped dead in her tracks. “What?” she stuttered, “I don’t understand.”

Her mother dropped her spoon into the half empty carton then turned in her chair to look at her daughter. As Betty took stock of her frazzled hair and bloodshot eyes, she found herself thinking how she’d never seen Alice look so old, so... _ broken _ . For the first time in her life, her mom seemed human, rather than some towering mythological presence sucking all the air out of the room. “Whatever it is, Mom…,” she started to say before getting cut off by an unexpectedly patronizing sigh. 

“Your father finally got a soul mark, Elizabeth,” Alice said frostily.

Betty suddenly felt lightheaded as the enormity of her mother’s words hit her. Before she had a chance to say anything else though, Alice added, “It doesn’t match mine, but I always knew it wouldn’t, if he ever got one.” 

Her mother’s blasé attitude about her father’s newly acquired soul mark was enough to shock her out of her temporary stupor. “Mom!” she admonished, “How can you say that?”

There was so much condescending pity in the look Alice gave her that Betty almost took a step back. “Because he showed me, Elizabeth. Couldn’t wait to, in fact. Told me that just because I was content to be miserable didn’t mean he needed to be,” her mom said with a quiver in her voice that Betty wasn’t entirely expecting. 

“Maybe you’re wrong,” Betty hedged, “about Dad’s soul mark not being a match with yours?”

Alice rolled her eyes, and for a minute, Betty thought she was looking at her sister Polly after a particularly rough Saturday night back in high school. “Soul marks come in  _ pairs _ , Betty. Since the man whose soul mark matches mine is still very much alive, your father’s newly acquired mark  _ can’t  _ activate mine.” She slumped a little to the side, her elbow absently pushing the ice cream container toward the middle of the table. 

Betty quietly walked closer until she found herself standing across from her mom, her hands resting lightly on the back of one of the dining room chairs. As she stood watching Alice’s anguish, she found herself unconsciously mulling over what Jughead had said to her about soul marks being more trouble than they were worth. A thought suddenly occurred to her then. “ _ Mom _ ?” she asked carefully. 

Even though Alice didn’t look at her, she knew she had the older woman’s attention from the way her shoulders rolled a little back as she waited for Betty to keep speaking. “Have you ever, you know, thought of retrying to reconnect? With the man with your matching soul mark?” Betty said tentatively.

Alice’s head raised so slowly that Betty almost wasn’t sure her mother was moving. The hurt that had been swimming around in her tear-stained eyes was replaced with something much colder. “No,” Alice said succinctly. 

“Why not?” Betty pressed, genuinely curious. “I mean, after everything people learned about the soul marks needing to be activated, didn’t you want to know?” 

Alice primly dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her robe before she said, “None of the reasons I had for rejecting him at eighteen changed, Elizabeth. I wasn’t content to be stuck in some rundown trailer on the Southside  _ then _ , and I’m still not.” She laid her hands flat on the table and pushed herself to stand, silently letting Betty know that their conversation was over. 

As she started to head toward the stairs, Betty softly called out, “I love you, Mom,” to Alice’s receding back. Her mother’s steps hesitated for a moment, and she almost thought Alice would reciprocate her sentiment. Instead, the older woman’s voice echoed through the darkness of the foyer, “Make sure you get to bed soon, Elizabeth. You get such unbecoming bags under your eyes when you get less than eight hours of sleep.” Betty sighed, and silently reminded herself that for all her mother’s perceived callousness, she meant well. 

She followed her mother upstairs several minutes later, a large glass of ice water clutched tightly in her hand. Walking into her room, she thought over all of the craziness she’d had to deal with between her quasi-successful movie non-date with Jughead and subsequent foray over to the Whyte Wyrm to learning about the impending break-up of her parents’ admittedly unhappy marriage. Pulling out a blue and gold novelty coaster that looked like an old 3.5 inch floppy disk that one of her former students had gotten her several years earlier, she set down the sweating glass of water on her dressing table, and went to pull a pair of pajamas out of her bureau. 

Betty was debating between a pair of light pink long soft cotton drawstring pajama pants and a pair of dark blue hot pants that said “Vixen” across the cheeks from her former cheerleading days, when her phone dinged with an incoming text message. She threw the grey t-shirt in her hand on to her bed, then grabbed her phone from where she’d set it down next to her bedside lamp. A smile spread slowly across her face as saw Jughead’s name illuminating the screen. Unlocking her phone one-handed as she took a drink of water, she quickly used her thumb to open up her messages, and nearly did a spit take once his message loaded. When she’d asked him to text her once he got home, she’d anticipated a brusque message along the lines of ‘Made it home.’ What she had decidedly  _ not _ expected was for him to send her a picture of Kevin, Fangs, and Sweet Pea asleep in a puppy pile on a pool table with the caption “Only the strong survive.” It was such a cheeky picture--the type of good-natured blackmail friends tended to keep on each other--that it both surprised her and warmed her heart that he’d chosen to share it with her. She bit her lip as she thought up a response, grinning wildly as she finally settled on something she hoped conveyed “Fun Betty” vibes, rather than “Desperately Trying Too Hard To Be Liked Betty” vibes. With one last rapid check for typos, she hit send and set her phone back down on the glass protecting the skirt on her bedside table from stains. 

Unfastening the bib on her denim overalls, she quickly whipped off the white t-shirt she’d been wearing underneath while simultaneously reaching for the faded grey shirt she’d set down on her bed. As she spun around to pull the pajama shirt on over her head, she noticed an odd shiny patch of skin peeking out from underneath one of the wings of her bra right near the lower side of her left breast. She turned ninety degrees to the side so that she could better see her torso in her dressing mirror before she finally removed her bra to investigate the discolored skin that had caught her eye. Betty’s jaw dropped as she struggled not to freak out with her mom asleep two doors down the hall. Staring back at her from the mirror was a section of silvery skin in the shape of a delicate-looking circlet about the size of a silver dollar that reminded her vaguely of the diadems royalty always wore in things like  _ The Lord of the Rings _ movies. 

Her fingers reached tentatively toward the mirror to trace the image she found there, not trusting herself to touch her skin yet, on the off chance it was a waking dream her mind had conjured in response to the day’s stress. The spidery circle looked nothing like what she’d thought her soul mark would be when she was a child. Even though her mother never talked about it, Betty had been fascinated by the ouroboros boldly wrapped around Alice’s ankle before she even knew what soul marks were: everything about the mark being at odds with the woman she knew. Then, when the waterfall had shown up on Polly’s shoulder blade in high school, Betty had been so jealous of how casually she’d shown it off all summer, finding any excuse to wear a tank top or spaghetti strap shirt. Her fingers pressed harder against the mirror as a small wave of disappointment came over her about  _ not _ having a bolder or flashier soul mark. However, almost as quickly as the feeling cropped up, it receded. 

For all their physical similarities, Betty couldn’t deny that Polly had more of their mother’s brashness, while she had more of their father’s quiet strength. If her soul mark had been a more attention-grabbing image, or in a more prominent placement, everyone who came in contact with her would have a piece of her and her relationship with her unknown soul mate. By having a more “modest” soul mark, she could choose to remain known as the poor unmarked Northsider to the world at large while sharing the truth with a few carefully selected loved ones...which, as much as it pained her, meant  _ not _ immediately telling her best friends. 

After all the times she’d cried on their shoulders in high school after being publicly ridiculed for not being marked yet, it felt wrong not to immediately share her news with Veronica and Kevin. Unfortunately, she knew exactly what would happen as soon as she told either of them: news of her soul mark would wind up all over Instagram within hours, and any hope she had of controlling access to this intimate part of her life would be lost. For a brief second, she contemplated telling Jughead, but she dismissed the idea almost as soon as it crossed her mind. They had only just become slightly more than acquaintances; she doubted he would care much at all about her monumental news. 

She pulled her hand back from the mirror and lightly ran her fingers over the shiny ring of skin just underneath her breast. The lack of texture surprised her. From the coloration of the skin, she’d been expecting the soul mark to have the roughness of thickened scar tissue. Tracing the circlet with her index finger, she had to admit that whatever power controlled the soul marks appeared to have an ironic sense of humor by branding her with a symbol of royalty. 

Suddenly, her finger stilled in its track. 

Royalty.

Like the Serpent Prince. 

She lost all feeling in her hands as she began to feel lightheaded. Betty refused to believe that on the same day her mother lost her husband, she found out that  _ her _ possible soulmate was the son of her mother’s worst enemy. ‘There was no way the universe could be that sadistic,’ she thought frantically. 

Her mind drifted back to her earlier thought about telling Jughead about her new soul mark. On the one hand, if he  _ was _ her soulmate, it seemed dishonest not to tell him. On the other hand though, they barely knew each other, and it was just as likely that he  _ wasn’t _ her soulmate, in which case, she would have riled up a snake pit for no reason. Mulling over her options, she tried to formulate her best course of action. “Well,” she said softly to her reflection after a few minutes’ thought, “no one else knows I have a soul mark, so people shouldn’t ask him anything about mine, but...If we’re going to tell people at the Revealing Ceremony that we’ve been together for a few months, then there’s a good chance they will ask me about  _ his _ ...Questions I’ll be able to answer much more convincingly if I’ve actually seen it…” She smiled at herself in the mirror, pleased that she had come up with such a reasonable excuse for learning more about his soul mark. With one final confirming head nod, Betty grabbed her pajama shirt off her bed and finished getting ready for sleep. 

* * *

He was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes the next morning when his phone  _ dinged _ with a new text message. To his confusion, a GIF popped up of Snoopy and Woodstock dancing while ‘Happy FriYAY!’ intermittently blinked in an alternating rainbow of colors. “Who the fuck wasted my data sending me this?” he grumbled as his eyes skimmed back up to the message sender. 

His knee jerk reaction was to text her back something sarcastic like asking if she was trying to be the “perfect” girlfriend, but he stopped himself. Without the benefit of tone, he found himself concerned that his words would come across as mean-spirited, rather than as his brand of sardonic humor. He searched through some of the funnier memes Sweet Pea periodically sent him until he came across what he was looking forward. Copying the meme, he pasted it into his message thread with Betty and hit “send.” 

Rolling out of bed, he straggled into the kitchen, and was surprised to see a nearly full pot of coffee. His eyes scanned the inside of the trailer until they landed on FP quietly drinking a cup of coffee on the couch. “You’re up early,” Jug said, his voice not quite sure if it was a question or a statement. FP didn’t even look over as he took another sip of coffee, and replied, “Couldn’t sleep.” 

Jughead nodded as he turned around to grab himself a cup of coffee. Given the extremely rocky relationship between FP and Gladys on top of their practically non-existent relationship with  _ him _ for much of his life, he tended to forget that there were many traits he shared with his parents--like his periodic bouts of insomnia. Waving the coffee pot at his father, he silently asked if FP was ready for a top-off. Glancing at his cup, he nodded, holding out his arm as Jug walked the short distance from the kitchen counter to the living room couch. 

Right as he started pouring the hot liquid into FP’s cup, the tinny sound of Jug’s text message alert tone echoed from his bedroom causing his eyes to shoot immediately to his father’s face. When he didn’t find himself staring back into an angry pair of brown eyes, he felt the muscles in his shoulders begin to loosen. His relief lasted long enough for him to take two steps back from FP. Once FP was safely outside the coffee pot’s potential splash zone, he said mildly, “Little early for text messages, isn’t it, Jug?”

He forced himself not to react as he kept walking back to the kitchen. Once he had the coffee safely stored back on the counter, he picked up his own coffee mug and took a deliberately long sip, stalling for time as he tried to think up an explanation his father would believe. Closing his eyes, he said tiredly, “Probably just another work thing.”

“What kind of fires your editor dealing with before eight a.m.?” The skepticism in FP’s voice sucked up all the remaining oxygen in the trailer. 

Jug shrugged as he did a half-turn to face his father. “His wife’s pregnant. Maybe something to do with that,” he said reasonably, letting the implication of her having gone into labor hang in the air. ( _ If he neglected to add she was in the first trimester and wouldn’t be going into labor for some time, well… _ ) FP studied him, an unnervingly prescient look passing through his brown eyes before he raised his coffee mug in a congratulatory salute.

Taking another sip of his lukewarm coffee, Jughead thought he was in the clear until he heard FP’s deceptively calm voice say, “Glad to hear it.Would hate to think it had anything to do with Betty Cooper showing up at the Wyrm last night.” He promptly choked on his coffee--his throat and lungs burning fiercely as he coughed until his eyes teared up. FP watched him cannily as he struggled to breathe freely again. 

Once it was clear that Jughead wasn’t going to die, FP continued, “Seeing her at the Wyrm made a lot of people nervous last night, Jug.” He paused for a moment, then added “I  _ hope _ she was telling the truth about just looking for Toni. You need to make sure all the younger Serpents know-- _ none _ of you are to get involved with her, you hear me? I already had to get the Serpents to accept that Toni accidentally bound herself to Cheryl Blossom, and it nearly tore us in two. If Alice Cooper finds out her daughter has become soul-bound to a Southsider--a Serpent? She will single-handedly burn the entire Southside to the ground, starting with the Whyte Wyrm.” 

As his father spoke, Jug couldn’t help but notice FP unconsciously rubbing the spot on the underside of his wrist where his soul mark was located. Jughead could probably count on one hand the number of times he’d seen his father’s soul mark over the years. FP was almost fanatical in his insistence on keeping it covered up: usually with the cuffs of his long sleeve shirts in the winter, and with a thick one-and-a-half inch wide leather cuff during the warmer months. The yin-yang symbol was about an inch in size, and always stood out to Jug because of how significantly different it was from the rest of FP’s ink. 

If he’d been more awake, Jug would’ve probably left well-enough alone; however, given Betty’s unnaturally early text message, his normal reticence filter had not yet snapped into place between his brain and his mouth. “Why, Dad?” he asked a little more forcefully than was wise causing FP’s brow to wrinkle. Before the older man had a chance to respond though, Jughead barrelled on, “Why is Alice Cooper so against the Serpents? With you as Serpent King, the Southside has flourished. The Serpents make sure that gangs like the Ghoulies and the Gargoyles aren’t dealing drugs like Jingle Jangle or Fizzle Rocks to kids in Riverdale. And yet,  _ The Register _ never seems to point out any of the  _ good _ things we do. Why?” 

FP stared at Jughead for so long the younger man was certain he’d  _ finally _ get the truth out of his dad about the Scourge of the Northside. Then, his fingers rubbed over his soul mark again. Suddenly, Jughead saw his father’s willingness to open up to him evaporate, so he wasn’t surprised when FP said cryptically, “I wouldn’t presume to speak for Alice Cooper.” Jughead watched his father slump forward over his cup of coffee and he knew their discussion was over. 

Walking back into his room, he caught sight of his exposed upper right arm. As he’d gotten older, he’d largely come to embrace FP philosophy of ignoring his soul mark’s existence; however, every now and then it would draw his attention in the mirror, and he’d wonder. For years, he’d thought of the image as a misshapen fork. It wasn’t until his first quasi-girlfriend in college had sarcastically pointed out, “Your soul mark looks like a weird crown. I guess that means your soul mate must be a  _ princess _ ,” that it had ever occurred to him to think of the image any other way. ( _ Admittedly, he liked the fork idea better because he assumed that meant food would always be involved. _ ) 

As his fingers traced over the shiny patch of skin the size of a deck of cards, his mind drifted to Betty. He found himself thinking, ‘You do think of her as the Northside Princess…’ but he abruptly cut off the line of thinking with a harshly muttered, “Don’t go there, Jones.” Grabbing a fresh pair of plaid cotton boxers and a pair of black jeans off the pile of unfolded clothing laying on the built-in desk in his room, he quickly pulled them on before reaching over to where he’d left his phone. The  _ ding _ that had aroused FP’s suspicions turned out to be from two separate text messages: one from Betty and one from Toni. 

Since he knew Toni’s text would likely be terse and straightforward, he decided to look at hers first. Much as he’d suspected, she’d distilled her message down to six words: ‘Cooper’s number. We WILL talk later.’ He quickly pulled up Betty’s contact card and shared it with Toni. There was no point being coy about it; she’d heard Betty claim to be looking for her and yet she’d seen her spend her entire time at the Wyrm talking to Jug. It would be an insult to their friendship if he pretended not to know what she was talking about. 

After the message to Toni went through, he turned to Betty’s, less confident in his expectations of what type of response she’d replied with. As the message chain opened, he rolled his eyes to keep from laughing and inviting further scrutiny from FP. ‘I see your Grumpy Cat, and raise you a….’ the message had started out before ending in a cheesy Doge meme about positivity. If not for the start of her text, Jug was sure he’d have misinterpreted her meme choice as being needlessly optimistic; however, by her indicating she was raising the stakes of this new meme game they appeared to be playing, he completely understood the cheeky, sarcastic intent behind her choice. It made for a nice change. Ever since he’d returned home from college, the only women he tended to come in contact with either Serpents, or Serpent-affiliates, both of which only seemed to come in two flavors: cloyingly obsequious, or obnoxiously nasty. 

Truth be told, it was one of the things he’d come to really appreciate about Betty in the week he’d gotten to know her better. The fact that he was FP Jones’ son—the Serpent Prince—meant absolutely nothing to her: she wasn’t trying to use him to further her own social aspirations, nor was she interested in leveraging his Serpent connections for her own gain. If anything, their entire arrangement was predicated on her selfless desire not to let down her best friend—the fact that he happened to be  _ the _ Jughead Jones was only superficially relevant to her achieving that goal.  _ He _ was the only person in Riverdale that Betty could realistically get away with dating without telling anyone. 

The fact that he also happened to find her hot, smart, and funny was beside the point. 

* * *

He’d been at work for two hours when The Kills “Sour Cherry” started blaring from his phone. As he answered, he said a silent thanks to Betty Cooper for waking him up early enough that no one else was at his office yet to hear his best friend’s embarrassing ringtone. The phone was barely to his ear when he heard Toni’s no-nonsense voice state, “Explain.” 

Jughead knew from the moment Betty showed up at the Wyrm that  _ somebody  _ would eventually have questions. The problem was: he and Betty hadn’t exactly discussed how he should handle that. When they’d formed their original agreement, it was only supposed to last a couple weeks, and she was never supposed to come in contact with any other Serpents, so he’d only agreed to lie to  _ her _ friends about their “relationship.” Unfortunately, too many of  _ his _ friends seemed to find themselves in bed with Northsiders. Unwilling to risk their deal on the strength of his friends’ discretion, he made a choice.

“I’m dating Betty Cooper,” he said, the lie passing through his lips as easily as if it were the truth. 

“Bullshit,” was Toni’s nearly instantaneous reply.

He swallowed carefully as he tried to remember the common “facts” he and Betty had agreed on at Pop’s. “We’ve been together for a few months,” he said, counting on Cheryl’s recent temporary banishment to help forestall Toni from testing their timeline too much. 

There was a long pause before Toni finally asked skeptically, “How’d you meet then?”

Jughead searched his mind before settling on a partial truth. “She interviewed me about saving the Twilight. We hit it off.”

“You expect me to believe that Alice Cooper’s daughter and FP Jones’ son have been dating for months and this is the first anyone’s heard of it?” she pushed.

Even though he knew she wouldn’t see it, he rolled his eyes before he sardonically replied, “Right, because why  _ wouldn’t _ Alice Cooper’s daughter and FP Jones’ son want to advertise their relationship?” 

There was another shorter pause. Then Toni asked casually, “Is it true then? Is she really unmarked?”

He knew what his best friend was really asking, and he found himself a little insulted by the implication. Unlike many of the other young Serpents, Jughead didn’t have a reputation for kissing and telling ( _ not that there were many to kiss and tell about anyway _ ), so it made Toni’s ploy both a little transparent and fairly easy for him to deflect. “That’s between me and her, Toni,” he said with a disapproving tsk, “You know that.” 

“You can’t blame me for being curious, Jug,” she said without a hint of remorse. 

The entitlement in her voice smacked of Cheryl Blossom, and it stung him to realize that she no longer seemed to value his privacy the way he had always respected hers. Before he had a chance to reconsider, he heard himself blurting out, “Is it true you accidentally got soul bound to Cheryl?” 

Her stony silence weighed on him as he cradled the phone next to his ear hoping she wouldn’t simply hang up on him. With each passing second, Jug increasingly felt as if all the oxygen in his lungs was being sucked out of him. Just as he was going to end the call, he heard Toni say in an odd voice, “No.” 

His phone clattered to his desk.

Quickly picking his phone back up, he managed to choke out, “What do you mean  _ no _ ?”

Toni sighed. “Nana Rose performed a Revealing Ceremony for us.” 

It was his turn to pause as he soaked in what she said. After a while he said, “Why, Toni? Why didn’t you tell anyone the truth? People got so afraid about getting soul bound after it got out about you two.” 

“FP,” she said succinctly.

“What does my dad have to do with it?” he asked in confusion.

“I went to him—before—to get his blessing. I knew once we were soul bound that I wasn’t going to be able to keep Cheryl away from the Serpents. FP refused. Told me I was too young to understand the first thing about being soul bound, and that I certainly had no business tying myself down to a Northsider,” she said, her voice getting bitterer with every word. 

Jughead had to admit, it sounded precisely like what his father would say. One thing still bothered him though, “If you’d already told him about the Revealing Ceremony, how’d you get him to buy you’d done it by accident instead?”

“No one knows  _ how  _ they work, Jug. FP couldn’t really say that it  _ hadn’t  _ been accidental,” she said in an unimpressed voice. “Besides, there are some really basic Revealing Ceremonies. It’s totally possible to perform the ritual without realizing it.”

Whatever else he was going to say was going to have to wait as he heard Cheryl’s shrill scream of excitement at being home a moment before Toni ended their call.

The bombshell Toni dropped on him was both more and less comforting than he hoped. He was relieved to know that Toni hadn’t just woken up one morning with an activated soul mark, but he  _ was _ troubled by her implication that it was possible to unintentionally perform a Revealing Ceremony. Given FP’s thoughts on the subject, Jughead had never given much thought to them and no one he knew ( _ before just now _ ) had ever done one. ‘Luckily,’ he found himself thinking, ‘I have a perfect excuse to discuss Revealing Ceremonies with Betty.’ Surely, if anyone was going have researched them, he had a feeling it would be her. As long as he knew what he absolutely needed to avoid doing to possibly complete a Revealing Ceremony around her, then it wouldn’t matter if she lied about not having a soul mark. 

His chest felt much lighter about spending time with Betty now that he had a plan--he only had to figure out how to tease the information out of her without telegraphing his real concern.


	7. We Must Be the Better Choice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jughead and Betty's plans to probe each other about soul marks and Revealing Ceremonies go a little awry when Archie and Veronica accidentally crash their swim "date" at Sweetwater River.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off--Thank you so much for taking the time to read/keep up with my story!! You're amazing!!
> 
> Second--still unbeta'd so I take full ownership of any errors. 
> 
> Finally--if you like that you've read, come finds me on the Tumblr @sunshinebunnie. Sometimes I do stuff like post sneak peeks of upcoming chapters. 😊😊😊

Betty hadn’t been to Sweetwater River in years, and was a little surprised when Jughead had suggested meeting up at a swimming hole fed by the river. Digging around in her closet, she prayed that her go-to black one-piece from high school would still fit, while silently cursing her knee jerk acceptance of his suggestion. In her eagerness to have a natural excuse to look at Jughead’s soul mark, she’d overlooked the fact that she now had her own newly acquired mark to consider. 

Several years earlier Veronica had surprised her with a blue and white bikini on their first Spring Break, and Betty had nearly broken out in hives. After so many years of being gawked at around Riverdale for being unmarked, she’d been loathe to advertise any more than necessary. Not to be deterred, her best friend had slowly coaxed her into the more revealing swimwear with the reminder that outside Riverdale,  _ no one _ knew about her reputation. After close to two decades of modest swimsuits, slipping into a bikini had wrought a sense of empowerment that she’d quickly become addicted to. Unfortunately, the confidence she’d developed that allowed her to sport a two piece without caring about the stares was not going to help her current predicament. 

Her hand finally landed on the black nylon/spandex fabric tucked away in the back of her closet. Pulling the garment out, she eyeballed it for a minute. Although her weight hadn’t substantially changed from the time she was eighteen, the way her weight was distributed on her slim frame was different. 

After fighting with the suit for several minutes, she gave up. The broadened flare of her hips was causing the modestly-cut leg openings to pull painfully against the inseams of her thighs, while her more amplily developed breasts were straining the limits of the swimsuit’s elasticity. She collapsed against her closet door with a quiet  _ thud _ . ‘I should’ve just lied and said I don’t know how to swim,’ Betty thought bitterly, ‘or that I’m aquaphobic.’ Her head bounced off the wooden door with another dull  _ thud _ . 

She was on the verge of texting Jughead a tepid excuse to get out of their proposed swim “date” when a flash of metallic green balled up in the back corner of her closet caught her eye. Rolling to her side, she stretched her arm as far as she could, her hand easily finding the large wad of cloth. Shaking out the material, she gasped. 

Polly had bought her the green tankini for her birthday several years earlier as something of a gag gift. At the time, she’d claimed she’d gotten it because the green would really bring out the color in Betty’s eyes, but Betty hadn’t missed the smug look her sister had given their mom at the pinched moue on Alice’s face as she’d taken in the color of the two-piece. Betty had tried the bathing suit on once to appease her sister, and had promptly thrown it in her closet when the high neck top draped off her frame like a strange circus tent. 

Given her lack of alternatives, she reluctantly pulled on the green top. 

Betty stared at her reflection in the mirror in shock. Unlike her one piece, the tankini top wasn’t painfully digging into her ribs, nor did she look like she’d thrown an oddly colored sheet over herself. She smiled, content that her momentary crisis had been sufficiently averted. 

*

Jughead hadn’t meant to get to Sweetwater River as early as he had, but FP had been far more interested in his whereabouts over the past few days. To avoid another round of “ _ Why We Don’t Mix With Northsiders, Boy _ ,” he’d hightailed it out of the trailer at the first sign of FP leaving for longer than five minutes. If he hadn’t already been in his swim trunks, he would’ve stopped at the Wyrm to kill some time; however, he didn’t want to chance running into his friends and risk having them invite themselves along to go swimming. Instead, he’d gone straight to the river, opting to lay out on a rock overhang with a copy of the latest book Betty had edited:  _ The Utkena, Riverdale’s Lost Citizens _ . 

He was halfway through the second chapter when he heard rustling in the trees closer to the waterline. His heart started racing as the thought momentarily crossed his mind that Sweet Pea or Fangs had spontaneously decided to go swimming. When he’d invited Betty swimming, he’d purposefully tried to pick the quietest spot he knew of, in order to lessen the chances of word getting back to FP about them being seen together. ( _ If it had the added bonus of no one else getting to see what Betty looked like in a swimsuit, well, he wasn’t about to look too deeply at his motivations _ .) 

From his vantage point on the rock, he had a good view of the watering hole’s small shoreline. As he watched, a head popped out of the trees, and Jughead stifled a groan. With his dad hounding him like a bad debt, Jughead had completely ignored the fact that  _ other _ people in Riverdale-- _ Northsiders _ \--also came to Sweetwater River. He peered carefully over the rock ledge trying not to attract any attention. 

There was a vaguely familiar flash of red hair, but he knew the person was too broad to be Jason Blossom. Squinting his eyes a little, he looked more carefully at the newcomer. A long distant memory of two little boys comically attempting to play t-ball percolated through his mind.  _ Archie Andrews _ . 

Jughead hissed out a soft curse at his Jones luck. Not only was the intruder someone who knew Betty, he had no way of warning her having left his phone back in the truck. For a brief second, he contemplated slithering back to his vehicle and ditching his plan to probe Betty about Revealing Ceremonies. Then it occurred to him--his Jones luck was actually on his side for once. When Betty first approached him with her predicament, she’d mentioned Archie and his fiancée Veronica as the reason she needed a fake boyfriend to begin with. Given that they’d inadvertently crashed their date, it would give him the perfect opportunity to bring up how soul mark ceremonies worked. 

He was still basking in the cleverness of his new plan when he heard a voice he didn’t recognize cry out, “Betty?” Immediately, he popped his head up, even as a small pit began forming in his stomach that she’d been blindsided by her friends’ presence. Luckily, his sudden movement had had the desired effect of briefly drawing Betty’s attention away from the petite woman in front of her. Subconsciously, he held his breath, waiting to see her next move. 

“V! Archie!” he heard Betty squeak with an impressive amount of poise. “What are you two doing here?”

“Daddy decided to have the pool repainted today of all days, so my lovely Archikins said he’d bring me to the swimming hole he used as a kid. It’s so  _ My Girl _ , don’t you think, B?” the woman who could only be Veronica replied.

Betty gave her friend a strangled half-smile/nod and he could read her thoughts as easily as if there was a thought bubble over her head: ‘But Thomas  _ died _ in  _ My Girl _ …’ As much as he wanted to laugh at how readily her face gave away her thoughts and emotions, a surprising part of him also wanted to tell off her friends for not noticing her discomfort like he did. ‘We’re not actually dating,’ he silently reminded himself as he attempted to dislodge the discomforting thoughts out of his head.

“Betty, I didn’t realize you knew about this swimming hole,” Archie said, drawing Jughead’s attention back to their conversation at the same time as Betty’s head slowly swivelled to face the red-head. Oblivious to the two pairs of eyes staring intently at him, Archie continued, “I mean, I was always told this was Serpent turf.” 

Her captivating green eyes shot skyward as she sought him out, a wildly questioning look overpowering everything about her expression. He gave her a small grin and her shoulders visibly relaxed. Before Betty had a chance to respond to Archie’s implied question, Jughead called down, “Then it’s a good thing that a Serpent invited her.” 

The brunette’s gasp was unmistakable as the three Northsiders stared at him, but his attention was focused entirely on Betty. If she had any lingering reticence about openly associating with a Serpent, the oddly possessive glint in her eye was doing a good job of hiding it. His chest swelled with pride as he grinned back at her, purposefully ignoring the apprehension rolling off her friends in waves. Grabbing his book, he worked his way down to the shoreline from the overhang, keeping a deft eye open for any more unexpected interlopers. 

As he made the last turn down to the water, his eyes went wide. In the five minutes it’d taken him to climb down from his perch, Betty had lost the denim shorts and peasant blouse she’d been wearing. In their place, she had put on a metallic jewel green bathing suit that left a teasing sliver of skin exposed along her waist. The rich green popped against her pale skin and made her eyes twinkle with an irresistible pull he couldn’t turn away. His mouth got drier the longer he stared at her as he tried to think of a good reason why he shouldn’t kiss her senseless. 

Just as he was on the verge of acting on his impulse to smash his mouth against hers, Archie let out an awkward laugh and Veronica blurted out, “What business do you have inviting my dear, sweet Betty to some secret Serpent swimming hole?”

Betty broke their eye contact first and a dark blush spread rapidly across her cheeks. 

The brunette’s implication that he was somehow out to corrupt her friend’s virtue was both insulting and weirdly prescient at the same time. However, since the whole point of their fake relationship was to ensure that Betty didn’t unintentionally derail her friends’ Revealing Ceremony, he forced himself not to give in to his desire to snipe back that his motivations were between him and Betty. Taking one more look at Betty, he silently wished she’d reopen her eyes so he’d have some idea of whether what he was about to do was ok with her. When she didn’t, he took a steadying breath before turning to Veronica and saying as evenly as he could manage, “Last I checked, I’m allowed to invite my girlfriend to hang out anywhere I please, including Serpent swimming holes, which begs the question: what are  _ you _ doing here?”

Jughead was pretty sure there were a million things he could’ve said in that moment that would’ve been met with a  _ less _ deafening silence--like that he’d killed someone, or was a former cult leader, or that he occasionally dabbled in cannibalism. Even though they weren’t  _ actually _ dating, Veronica’s continued gaping set his teeth on edge: another harsh reminder that regardless of whatever budding feelings he might be developing for Betty, in her world, he’d always be considered Southside trash that wasn’t good enough for the Northside princess. 

He could feel his blood pressure skyrocketing when suddenly a delicate hand wove its fingers between his, giving his hand a gentle squeeze. Glancing over, he found Betty giving him a soft smile before she turned her attention to her friends and said a little tentatively, “ _ Surprise _ .” 

Veronica continued watching them in unconstrained shock, periodically trying to string a question together only to give up after stuttering out, “How...I...wha..” While Jughead was waiting to see if Betty’s best friend could swallow her disapproval long enough to berate him, Archie surprised him by quietly asking, “Do you make her happy?”

Of all the potential questions he’d spent the last week thinking up answers to, it had never occurred to him that anyone would ask him anything beyond superficial “meet-cute” questions or salacious “Jones/Cooper” things. Without a readily available canned answer, he paused as he thought back over all the not-dates and friendly meme wars they’d recently shared. A small grin played at the corner of his mouth before he said more honestly than he intended, “I’d like to think so.” Betty gave his hand a squeeze and he smiled a little wider.

*

“Betty dear, I seem to have left my suntan lotion in the car. Will you go with me to get it?” Veronica said with an affectatious smile as she looped their arms together, not-so-subtly pulling Betty away from Jughead. 

Betty knew this discussion was coming the minute she broached the tree line and caught sight of Archie and Veronica at the river’s edge. If anything, she was impressed it took V so long to regain her composure. Although she’d known that introducing Jughead as her boyfriend would invite questions, the dumbstruck shock struck her as a little heavy-handed. Before she had a chance to say a word to Jughead though, Veronica was forcing her back in the direction of the trees. 

When they were sufficiently obscured by the surrounding greenery, Veronica pulled to a stop before turning to Betty with a shrewd look. “Care to explain why the Serpent Prince is claiming to be your boyfriend?” she said after a minute. 

Betty gave a small shrug as she tried to think up a realistic back story. Since she hadn’t planned on needing to lie to Veronica for longer than the length of the Revealing Ceremony, she thought they had at least a couple more days before they needed to come up with the story of how they met. The easiest lie would’ve been to say that they met through work, but Betty knew she’d never believe her: Veronica had vicariously lived through Alice Cooper’s war against Red & Black Publishing when Betty had briefly moved into the Pembrooke to escape the worst of her mother’s vitriol. As she continued to stare expectantly at her, Betty’s mind wandered to the conversation she and Jughead had at the Twilight about the article she’d written about him years earlier. 

“We’ve been dating for a couple months,” Betty said almost shyly as Veronica’s eyes went wide. Before her best friend had a chance to say anything, she added, “I reached out to him because I’ve been thinking about doing a follow-up piece on the Twilight Drive-in. I’d been going through some of my old clippings from high school and realized it had been ten  _ years _ since I wrote that article about everything he’d done to save the drive-in. With Riverdale’s jubilee practically around the corner, it seemed like the type of feel-good nostalgia piece  _ The Register _ could run to curry some goodwill with Mayor McCoy.” 

Veronica gave her one of her long, slow blinks that telegraphed her skepticism better than any words. Cocking her head to the side, her friend said, “And you mean to tell me that  _ your mom _ is ok with this... _ development _ ?” disbelief dripping off every syllable.

As she gave Veronica a genuinely abashed look, Betty felt her conscience lighten a little-- _ this _ at least was something she didn’t need to lie about. “She doesn’t know?” she said with a hint of a plea in her voice. 

A harsh exhalation escaped Veronica as she threw up her hands with an exasperated, “ _ B _ !” 

“I know, I know,” Betty agreed even as she rushed on, “but it’s not like we’re soul bound. Besides, aren’t you always the one telling me I need to take charge of my life, and not be so concerned with what other people think?”

“I didn’t intend for you to cause rioting in the streets of Riverdale, B!” Veronica said with a slight screech. 

Betty gave her best friend a small smile. It would be so easy--so  _ prudent _ \--to give up the whole charade right there and then, but a niggling feeling at the back of her mind kept bringing her thoughts back to the same conclusion: she actually _ enjoyed  _ Jughead’s company. Yes, there was some truth to the fact that she was curious whether Jughead’s soul mark was connected to her own, but it was more than that. She liked that despite his seemingly grumpy exterior he had a surprisingly fine-tuned sense of humor, and that even when he was angry, he was still willing to try being fair. It certainly didn’t hurt that she found herself more viscerally attracted to him the longer she spent in his presence. 

After a little bit, Veronica gave Betty an indulgent smile of her own before sighing dramatically. Looping their arms back together, V pulled her closer until they were shoulder to shoulder and she could rest her head on her shoulder. “Everyone deserves a chance to run a little wild. I’ve certainly had my fair share of bad boy dalliances, so who am I to judge?” Veronica said almost wistfully. 

She returned Veronica’s words of encouragement with a firm arm squeeze of her own. Since she knew Alice would never approve of Jughead--if they ever legitimately started dating--it meant a lot to know that, at least theoretically, she had the support of her closest friends. 

*

When the young women returned to the shoreline, Betty found herself automatically seeking out Jughead only to be caught off guard by the unexpected view of his naked back. He wasn’t muscular in the obvious way Archie was, but he had a tension about him that some rangy men possess that telegraphs to the world that the I-beams of their bodies are pure reinforced steel. Her skin began to feel uncomfortably warm the longer she stared at the tempting valley between his shoulder blades that was begging her to nuzzle her face there. Furtively, she glanced at Veronica to see if she’d picked up on Betty’s unmitigated lust. Luckily, Betty found she was too caught up in ogling Archie. She breathed a small sigh of relief. After everything she’d just told Veronica to convince her that she was in fact dating Jughead, it would do her no favors if her best friend caught her gawping at her supposed boyfriend like she’d never seen him naked. 

Before she could school her face into a more neutral expression, Jughead turned around as Archie caught sight of his fiancée and yelled out, “Ronnie! Jughead’s never heard my bear story!”

Betty suspected Veronica groaned—personally, even  _ she’d  _ lost count of how many times she’d had to sit through Archie’s “I was mauled by a bear” story over the years—but she wasn’t sure. Jughead’s blue eyes had locked on her, their expression morphing almost instantaneously from casual humor to overpowering hunger as he took in her own naked lust. Unlike the Twilight, she couldn’t tell herself that what she thought was desire was simply a trick of the light.The thought that he wanted to rip off her tankini and have his way with her right there left her surprisingly breathless and achy. His hungry gaze lingered just a little too long and Betty ducked her head in embarrassment when Veronica noticed. 

*

He hadn’t meant to stare, or at least he hadn’t meant to stare so openly. When he’d first seen her in her green swimsuit though it was as if someone was pulling a joke on him—searing the image of the perfect Northside princess in Serpent colors into his memories forever. It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to remember that this  _ thing _ between him and Betty had a definitive end date: namely, some time shortly after Archie and Veronica’s Revealing Ceremony, and it made his guts churn. Unlike some Serpents ( _ cough _ Sweet Pea  _ cough _ ), Jughead never found a thrill in chasing Northside women--he wasn’t interested in whoring himself to random women looking for kicks and he wasn’t such a dick that he wanted to collect women like video game badges. 

His honor was at the root of his anguish. He knew how badly he wanted to pull her aside to some quiet nook and fuck her senseless, and from the thirst her eyes were telegraphing, he was confident she felt the same. As  _ physically _ satisfying as he knew that would be though, the problem was that his lust for her wasn’t limited to her body. He found himself looking forward to her spontaneous meme texts ( _ even if he had burned through more of his data plan in the past week than he had in years _ ). He liked that she wasn’t afraid to call him out on his moody shit, but that she was also humble enough to recognize her own faults. Jughead wasn’t so idealistic to believe he was in love, but he chafed against the idea that he couldn’t even  _ explore _ something deeper with Betty than a couple quick and dirty fucks. 

A dark broody cloud was starting to settle over him when Betty caught his eye and gave him a shy, tentative smile. There was something so open and genuine in her expression, it was like a defiant ray of sunlight trying to break through in the middle of a raging storm. A tension he didn’t even realize he was holding in his shoulders started bleeding away the longer he focused on Betty’s sparkling eyes. 

He was so captivated by the blonde angel on the shoreline that he was completely caught by surprise when Archie exclaimed, “Dude! Gnarly soul mark!”

Jughead snapped back to himself with a silent groan. FP had driven it so deeply into his psyche that soul marks were bullshit that he tended to forget  _ other _ people still took an interest in them. 

“Thanks,” he said dryly, hoping that would be the end of it.

“Ronnie, you should see this!” Archie yelled excitedly to his fiancée. “His soul mark is a  _ fork _ !”

Suddenly, his attention was completely on the other man as he said, “Right?!”

Veronica came closer, pulling Betty along by the arm. Tilting her head to the side, the brunette peered critically at the mark before saying, “A fork? Honestly, Archie. It’s a crown. See? The points aren’t uniform enough to be a fork.”

Archie took another look at Jughead’s arm, a deep crease beginning to form in his brow. “I still see a fork,” he said skeptically.

Jughead was about to snap that it didn’t matter what it looked like when Veronica piped up, “B, what do you say? Is it a fork or a crown?”

He stood stock still as Betty inched closer. ‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter,’ he silently repeated like a mantra as her fingers lightly touched his arm. She traced his skin with slow measured strokes treating his soul mark like it was a priceless antiquity she was being asked to appraise. As she meticulously studied his skin, there was a brief moment where he almost felt like his soul mark vibrated, but the phantom sensation passed through him so quickly that he was convinced he imagined it. Finally, after what felt like an almost interminable amount of time, Betty quietly said, “I think V’s right.”

His brain struggled to make sense of her words as her hand continued to absently caress his bicep. A part of himself that he didn’t recognize seemed to be screaming at him that there was some hidden significance to her words, but it was like trying to make sense of a message someone was trying to whisper in his ear while they were both under water. He was still struggling to understand why he felt so certain that Betty thinking his soul mark looked like a crown  _ meant _ something when Veronica suddenly squealed.

“Oh my God, Archie! With Betty and Jughead in the Circle of Love at our Revealing Ceremony, imagine how supercharged our soul marks are going to be when they activate!” she said enthusiastically clapping her hands together. 

Betty’s hand immediately stilled against his arm. “V, you didn’t mention anything about doing a Circle of Love,” she said. Although her voice didn’t sound panicked, Jughead could feel her nervous energy as it vibrated through her fingertips as they rested against his skin. 

“Circle of Love?” he asked after wracking his brain to see if he could figure out why the term would make Betty so nervous.

Veronica gave him a mildly imperious look that set his teeth on edge before saying, “It’s a part of the Revealing Ceremony.”

His knee jerk reaction was to snap back something along the lines that ‘ _ being from the Southside didn’t make him a moron _ ’ but he resisted the urge just in time. If, for some reason, their Revealing Ceremony failed to activate their soul marks, Jughead didn’t want to give Veronica Lodge and the rest of the Northside any way to claim he’d sabotaged her and Archie out of spite. Before he could do much more than give her a sardonic eyeroll though, he heard Betty say, “Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic, V?”

“Hardly, B. I mean, a  _ true _ Romeo and Juliet kiss? That’s better than a couple that’s been married for sixty years!” Veronica said with a casual flourish of her hand. 

Outwardly, nothing about Betty or Jughead’s demeanors changed, but he knew she must’ve felt as unsettled as he did if the slight tremor in her hand was any indication. As much as it killed him to display any kind of ignorance in front of Northsiders, he knew this was probably going to be his best chance of learning more about the mechanics of the Revealing Ceremonies. Swallowing past the lump in his throat that tasted suspiciously like his pride, he said, “What does other people kissing each other have to do with activating soul marks?”

It was Veronica’s turn to roll her eyes with a sigh before replying with exaggerated patience, “The  _ Circle of Love _ is not just about other people kissing. As part of the Revealing Ceremony, our dearest loved ones and their significant others stand around us. Then, everyone repeats the Words of Unity together before ending the rite with everyone simultaneously kissing. According to experts, the waves of love that are supposed to radiate off the couples surrounding us will pass through me and Archie and help amplify whatever it is that makes the soul marks activate.”

As Jughead mulled over Veronica’s words, his arm unconsciously dropped to Betty’s waist, pulling her against his chest like a security blanket. The buzzing feeling in his mind came back tenfold when Betty slipped her arms around his waist and laid her head against his chest. With her head so close to his face, he could easily pick out the subtle notes of strawberry lingering in her hair from her shampoo, and he found himself struggling to remember why he was even talking to Veronica Lodge in the first place. 

His mind was starting to drift back down the dangerous path of imagining how soft and inviting the rest of Betty’s body would be when Archie’s voice suddenly piped up, “We know the couples in the Circle of Love are normally soul bonded already, but given Betty’s... _ situation _ , we thought it would be ok, you know?”

Jughead felt Betty squeeze him a little tighter when Archie referred to her “situation,” and he felt something deep within him ache for her. When Betty had first come to him, he’d broadly understood that her being unmarked was connected to the reason she needed to bring a fake boyfriend to the Revealing Ceremony. It had never occurred to him though that Northsiders could be just as prejudiced against people without soul marks as they were against Southsiders. Right as he was on the verge of parroting one of FP’s favorite lines about how ‘ _ nothing about a soul mark should dictate how you live your life _ ,’ Archie’s voice said with a surprisingly amount of thoughtfulness, “Who’s to say that just because she isn’t marked  _ now  _ that that means that she  _ isn’t  _ your soulmate, right?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for reading!!
> 
> If you can spare a minute, comments/fic recs/kudos/reblogs/bookmarks are always super, super, super appreciated!!


	8. What’s Love Got To Do With It?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Betty and Jughead attend the much anticipated Revealing Ceremony, and Nick St. Clair gets a lesson in manners from Jughead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First--thank you so much for taking the time to read! I greatly appreciate it!!
> 
> Second--this is unbeta'd. I am the sole owner of any and all errors.
> 
> Third--come play with me on Tumblr @sunshinebunnie! Sometimes I even do stuff like post upcoming sneak peeks...😊😊😊
> 
> Fourth--TRIGGER WARNING: in this chapter, Nick St. Clair does some mild, but typical Nick-St.Clair-like stuff. If this is a trigger for you, please consider yourself warned.

Betty had hoped that she and Jughead would have a chance to spend more time together before the Revealing Ceremony after Archie and Veronica accidentally crashed their swim “date.” Unfortunately, it seemed like fate was continuing to conspire against them. Each time Betty would try to set aside time to see Jug, he would text her at the last minute saying his dad needed him to handle some Serpent business. Then, by the time he had a chance to reschedule their ( _ not _ ) dates, Betty’s editor had dropped some urgent deadlines on her and she’d been stuck at the Blue & Gold for days. 

To make up for their physical separation, Betty found herself texting Jughead more and more as the week went on. At first, they were more of the cheeky positivity memes she’d taken to sending him to start his day. Then, after their first few attempts to meet up failed, she’d texted him about logistics: where the ceremony was being held, if they’d arrive together or separate, had he gotten his suit pressed. Before she knew it though, she was texting him simply because she  _ missed _ him. Texts that she normally would’ve sent to Veronica or Kevin—like complaining about her boss’ unreasonableness—were suddenly going to Jughead instead, his dry sarcasm beginning to run through her mind like a voiceover narrating the events of her day. 

Then, there were the texts she forced herself  _ not _ to send him. The ones in the middle of the night when she was alone in her room, skin buzzing, unable to sleep. When her mind would conjure up the memory of how  _ warm _ his skin felt beneath her fingers, how  _ firm _ the planes of his body looked, how  _ hungrily _ he had gazed at her. As her slim fingers would ghost their way down her stomach, under the waistband of her pajamas, she forced herself not to reach out to him to see if he was awake, even as she secretly hoped that he was touching himself as he thought about her. Each night as she steadily worked her clit, her teeth dug increasingly harder into her bottom lip to keep her from accidentally moaning his name loud enough for her mother to hear.

*

Betty woke up earlier than normal on the morning of the Revealing Ceremony, a nervous anticipation settling in her stomach. As she lay in bed, she looked over toward where she’d laid out her outfit the night before. She liked the ice blue that Veronica had picked out—it made her feel like a Disney princess—but she found herself suddenly worrying about the off-the-shoulder neckline. Although mentally she knew that the likelihood of her suffering a wardrobe malfunction that would reveal her newly acquired soul mark was nearly nonexistent, she still couldn’t shake the lingering feeling that somehow she was going to ruin Veronica’s day. 

‘At least I don’t have to worry about my mom starting a fight with Jug at the ceremony,’ she thought as she tried rolling over to go back to sleep. 

Although her parents’ separation had been painful for their family in general, Betty couldn’t deny that it had at least alleviated one source of gnawing anxiety for her. Since it was generally accepted that single people didn’t attend Revealing Ceremonies and Alice had no particularly close bond of her own with the Lodges, Betty knew her mom would no longer be attending. A larger part of her than she cared to admit wished she’d been brave enough to tell Jughead that they should drive over to the ceremony together, but every time her fingers had been on the verge of typing out the message, some vestigial sense of self-preservation would kick in and stop her. While she was loathe to admit it, she knew any Southsider would draw attention in a residential area on the Northside—a known Serpent even more so—and even if Alice wasn’t home, she’d hear word of Jughead coming to their house before they even made it to Lodge Lodge. Likewise, she knew that FP had seen her car that night at the Whyte Wyrm. She wasn’t so naive as to think there weren’t eyes all over the Sunnyside Trailer Park that reported all of its comings and goings to the Serpent King. Given the long-standing bad blood between their parents and the frosty reception she’d gotten from FP the last time she’d seen him, she could only imagine the hell Jughead would be in for if FP heard she’d shown up at their home. 

Betty’s attempts to fall back asleep were fraught as an apocalyptic vision of Riverdale in flames played on a loop in her mind as her subconscious tried to undermine her less-than-foolproof plan. Although she knew it did him a disservice, a part of her  _ hoped  _ Jughead would stand her up. Veronica and Archie’s Revealing Ceremony was hardly a “low key” event—nearly all of the most prominent Northside families would be represented, and there was sure to be blowback over a “relationship” that didn’t actually exist. 

There was, of course, the  _ other _ thought that had been plaguing her since seeing his soul mark at Sweetwater River:  _ What if they activated  _ their _ soul marks at the Revealing Ceremony during the Circle of Love? _

The upshot of not spending as much time together as she’d initially anticipated was that she’d had plenty of extra time to research her concerns. While she’d been unable to find any  _ documented _ cases of such a thing occurring, she also hadn’t found anything to suggest it was impossible either. 

Every time she found her thoughts drifting toward what it would be like to be soul bound to Jughead, her heart seemed to beat a little faster and her breathing got slightly shallower. She tried to pass off her reaction as a natural consequence of her apprehension about being tied for life to the one person in Riverdale she wasn’t supposed to socialize with at all, but in her quietest moments, at her most honest, she couldn’t deny the thrill she got over the idea of calling him her own forever. 

As she continued tossing and turning, her thoughts drifted to his lips—as they frequently had since learning about the planned Circle of Love. His mouth had a sensuousness about it that led her to believe Jughead would be an amazing kisser—not like some of the guys she’d kissed who’d been all wormy lips and flailing tongues. Squeezing her eyes tighter in an effort to forcibly bring back her elusive sleep, her mind brought up the unbidden image of his insistent lips wrapped around her pert nipples, sucking on the sensitive nubs until he’d not-so-accidentally graze his teeth over her taut flesh. Betty pressed her thighs together as the increasingly familiar dull throbbing in her pussy began to take hold. 

Rolling over onto her stomach, she absently slid a hand under the waistband of her pajamas, her fingers smoothly coasting along the valley between her thigh and her pelvis. Her index finger lightly toyed with the outer lips of her pussy, her nail gently scraping against her hairless skin. The sensation made her tingle, and she could feel herself get wetter from the teasing stimulation. In her mind’s eye, she called up a memory of his hands, his fingers impossibly long compared to hers, and she let out the faintest of whimpers as she pressed her right index and middle fingers inside her velvety channel. 

Betty slowly humped her hand, her thumb rubbing intently against her clit, but it wasn’t enough. It had been so long since she’d last had sex, and she missed the sweet sting of having her cunt stretched by a thick, hard cock. She started working her hips faster, trapping her nimble hand between her mattress and her pussy, keeping half an ear out for any sign of her mother. Right as she sensed her orgasm drawing nearer, one of the springs in her bed frame gave an unmistakable squeal of protest. Betty immediately froze, fingers still buried knuckle-deep inside herself, as she waited with baited breath to see if the sound was enough to alert Alice. 

She was just beginning to think she was in the clear when she heard the familiar sound of her parents’ bedroom door swinging open. ‘Fuck,’ she thought in frustration. For a brief second, she considered trying to finish getting off, but the thought of her mom walking in on her killed whatever thought she had of cuming. 

Betty had barely rolled over onto her back when the door of her room swung open, and her mom casually strolled in. 

“Good, you’re up, Elizabeth,” Alice said without preamble as Betty did her best not to glare too resentfully at her. She passed a cursory look over Betty’s room as she walked over toward the windows to open up the curtains. Betty knew the perfunctory perusal was a sham. Back when they were teenagers, Polly had snuck more than one boy into her room in the middle of the night. When Alice would invariably come to check on the suspicious noises she’d heard, she’d quickly “scan” the room, waiting for Polly to think she was in the clear then following wherever her gaze immediately landed. The ploy had been so successful over the years that she had posted close to a ninety percent detection rate. 

When Betty failed to react, Alice’s mouth puckered as her eyes cannily scanned around the room a second time. Despite her focused inspection, her attempt at uncovering evidence of Betty having a “guest” proved futile; and her expression soured even more. Eventually, Alice turned her gaze toward the pale blue dress hanging up on her closet door. She crossed her arms and began tapping her foot in a steady beat as she brought her attention back to Betty. 

“Honestly, Elizabeth, you can’t still be thinking of going to Veronica’s Revealing Ceremony,” she said, disapproval dripping off every word.

Betty closed her eyes for a second to keep from unloading all of her frustration over her lost orgasm. As she took in a calming breath, she found her mind going unbidden to Jughead and the way his presence had begun to help keep her anchored. She focused her thoughts on the way his eyes would crinkle whenever he laughed, holding tight to the image in her mind as she eventually answered, “Yes, I am, mom. Veronica’s my best friend. She wants me there and  _ I _ want to be there to support her and Archie.”

“I thought you were smarter than that,” Alice said haughtily before adding, “although, I guess with your  _ situation _ , there’s less risk.” 

Over the years, Betty had heard so many snide and disapproving remarks from her mother about her lack of a soul mark—frequently in the context of Hal being unmarked as well—that she’d gotten used to not responding. Between her sleep deprivation and sexual frustration though, Betty’s normal “Alice filter” wasn’t completely locked in place. Before she had a chance to fully think about it, Betty snapped back, “And just what  _ situation  _ would that be?”

Alice’s eyes flashed for a brief second as her head swiveled back toward Betty before she said in a syrupy voice, “If you really want to support Veronica, you’ll keep that toxic energy away from her Revealing Ceremony. Being unmarked doesn’t give you a license to be selfish, Elizabeth.” 

Bile started to rise in Betty’s throat as she gave serious consideration to whipping off her shirt to gloat about her new soul mark. As her fingers started inching toward the hem of her shirt though, a thought occurred to her. 

Alice was nearly halfway out of her room when Betty called after her, “What is it that bothers you more, mom? Me being unmarked, or the fact that I might someday wind up soul bound to a Southsider?  _ Just. Like. You _ .” 

Her mother paused in the doorway, an unmistakable tension in her shoulders in response to Betty’s question. Without bothering to turn around, Alice called back to Betty, “I hope you’re planning to do something about your face before the ceremony. You have the most unattractive bags under your eyes this morning,” before she headed downstairs. 

*

As Jughead adjusted his tie for the fifth time, he wasn’t sure what he felt more strangled by: the uncomfortable piece of clothing, or his new apparent habit of entering into terrible deals. 

While he and Betty had been hashing out the logistics of getting to Veronica and Archie’s Revealing Ceremony, it had occurred to him that he’d  _ never _ make it out of the trailer at night in a suit without alarm bells going off with FP. (The thought of having to drive FP’s truck up to  _ Lodge Lodge _ had also filled him with an overwhelming sense of shame that he hadn’t felt since he was a kid.) He’d spent several days mulling over his options, and he kept coming back to the same conclusion: he needed to ask Toni and Cheryl for help. In exchange for getting ready at Thornhill and the loan of Cheryl’s car, Jughead had agreed to put in several good words with FP on Cheryl’s behalf to help heal the division between the two halves of Toni’s life. 

“Stop messing with your tie, peasant. You’re going to ruin my perfectly executed Windsor knot,” Cheryl said as she casually smacked Jughead’s hand away from the dark green silk. Jughead scowled. Toni caught his eye over Cheryl’s shoulder and gave him a long-suffering glare of warning. Letting out an annoyed huff of air, he forced himself to close his eyes and count backward from fifty before he did something else to set off the mercurial She-Beast of Thornhill. 

His frayed patience was nearing its end right as he heard Toni say, “Now, about the beanie.” Immediately, his blue eyes snapped open.

“ _ Leave it _ ,” he said with a low snarl. The warning in his voice stopped Toni’s fingers inches from his hat. 

“Jug,” Toni answered with a small warning of her own.

“I said leave it, Toni. If my beanie can stop Archie Andrews’ and Veronica Lodge’s soul marks from activating, then I think they’ve got much larger issues,” he said firmly. 

“Far be it for me to assume  _ your girlfriend _ might actually like it if you left the beanie home for one evening,” Toni said with a dry smirk.

Jughead forced himself to keep his face neutral when Toni called Betty his girlfriend despite the thrill that ran up his spine. He knew he was likely to hear the term a lot at the Revealing Ceremony; if he kept acting like he was caught off guard by it, no one was going to believe they’d been together for months. Giving Toni a sardonic look of his own, he shrugged as he said, “Betty knows the beanie and I are a package deal.”

Toni rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say, Jones.”

Before he could respond, Jughead abruptly felt a sharp yank on his neck bringing his attention back to the put-upon redhead in front of him. He wasn’t entirely sure if the grimace gracing Cheryl’s face was intended to be threatening or reassuring, so he decided to err on the side of physical safety and gave her a self-effacing shrug of apology. Cheryl’s grimace quickly morphed into a glare, and he couldn’t help but inwardly cringe. Despite all his talents as a writer, Jug had no idea what he could possibly say to FP to make Cheryl seem more “acceptable” to the Serpent King. 

“Now remember, pleb, the paint job on my Impala cost more than all those shanties in the Hooverville you call home. If my Chevy comes back in anything other than its current mint 1961, showroom-ready condition, there will be hell to pay. Do I make myself clear?” Cheryl said with her typical battering ram subtlety. 

“I’ve driven a car before, Cheryl,” he said sharply, his nerves finally frayed raw from the continued delay in getting to Betty. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he could just about see Cheryl’s knuckles whiten around her plastic cherry keychain. “ _ A  _ car, not  _ my _ car, hobo,” she said after a minute, “and don’t you forget it.” 

For a split second, Cheryl balled her fist tighter around her car keys, and Jughead secretly wondered how much damage she could do to him if she were to fling them at him from such close range. When she merely shoved the keys against the lapel of his suit jacket, he found himself releasing the breath he’d unconsciously been holding. As she spun around on her heel and began walking out of the living room, he barely had time to register her adding, “And I expect the gas tank to be full when you return it,” before she vanished in a ruby-colored chiffon cloud. 

“Why did I think this was a good idea?” Jughead muttered to himself as he slipped the keys to Cheryl’s vintage Impala into his suit pocket.

Toni chuckled, catching him by surprise; he hadn’t realized she’d still been close enough to hear him. “You didn’t,” she affirmed, “but it  _ is _ the smart play if you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re fraternizing with  _ the Northside Princess _ from FP.”

Jughead groaned. He wasn’t sure which he hated more: the fact Toni was right, or the fact that he felt so infantilized as a twenty-six year old man that he couldn’t be openly seen spending time with a single woman he was increasingly attracted to. 

“One day, Toni,” he said tiredly, “one day FP is going to give me a straight answer about the bad blood between him and Alice Cooper.”

Toni chuckled again. “Perhaps, Jug,” she agreed, “but today is not that day. Besides, if you spend any more time dawdling, you’re going to completely miss the Revealing Ceremony, and then you may find out for yourself whether your girlfriend actually shares her mom’s feelings about Southsiders.”

Jughead’s attention shot to his wrist, the wide leather cuff of his Fossil watch the only other reminder aside from his beanie that he had no business being at an invite-only Northside social event. He grimaced as he mentally calculated how long it was going to take him to get from Thornhill to Lodge Lodge. 

As he strode off toward the front door, he heard Toni call after him, “Remember the First Law, Jones!” her voice dying off in an ominous echo around the sparsely populated house.

*

For as many years as she’d known Veronica, Betty had come to understand that the word  _ moderation _ had been wiped out of the Lodges’ vocabulary. Still, she couldn’t deny that Veronica would periodically catch her off-guard with  _ just _ how over the top she could be. As her eyes looked out the window of the guest bedroom Veronica had commandeered as the “command center” for the Revealing Ceremony, she found herself asking, “A temporary  _ helipad _ , V?  _ Seriously _ ?”

Veronica spun around on her heel to look at Betty, dislodging the hem of her violet and white ballgown from the mealy grasp of the event coordinator’s cowed assistant as she tried to finish checking the dress for any grass stains from the photos they’d taken out on the front lawn earlier in the afternoon. V rolled her eyes good-naturedly as she gave Betty a blasé wave of her hand. 

“The St. Clairs swore they didn’t mind driving up, but Daddy positively  _ insisted _ on them having the option of taking their helicopter,” she said. 

As the assistant moved to check on a different section of Veronica’s hem, she gave a soft sigh before adding, “To be honest, I hope they do. I wouldn’t mind going for a romantic sunset flight around the lake with Archiekins after the ceremony is over.” 

Betty could feel the tension in her face as she strained to keep her perfectly supportive “best friend” smile carefully in place. Although she knew that Veronica didn’t intend to flout her status as a _.01_ Percenter, it was in moments like these that Betty felt like she wasn’t a _true_ Northsider. Even before she got her soul mark— she didn’t find herself impressed with, or even envious of, the world that Veronica’s wealth opened to her—where the idea of someone _loaning_ out their helicopter for a spur-of-the-moment joyride seemed _reasonable_. 

She could feel a slight quiver in her cheek muscles as her left eye began twitching, and Betty feared her pasted on smile was finally morphing into an unmistakable grimace when her slim ice blue clutch started vibrating. Cracking open her purse as surreptitiously as she dared, she caught a glance of Jughead’s name as it quickly flashed across her phone screen. Her eyes flickered from the shadowy pocket of sateen lining over to Veronica. Seeing that her attention was currently focused on the event planner’s assistant, who was enthusiastically trying to get a small grass stain out of the hem on the back of Veronica’s dress, Betty used the opportunity to slip out of the room and into the hall. She quickly pulled out her phone and hoped that she hit the “Answer Call” button fast enough. 

Betty felt the tension in her face melt away as her perfect “Northside Princess” smile gave way to genuine happiness as Jughead’s voice washed over her through the phone.

“I’m not sure I dressed properly for this shindig, Betts,” he said with the characteristic smirk in his voice that she found made her smile even wider.

“Why’s that, Jug? You said you had a suit you could wear,” she asked, hoping that her voice didn’t hold any residual traces of inbred Northside bias.

There was a pause, and then what sounded like the long drag on a cigarette before she heard the comforting timbre of his voice as he chuckled before adding, “A suit? Yes. But if you’d warned me there’d be so many sharks around, I would’ve brought my switchblade and my brass knuckles too.”

It was Betty’s turn to laugh—a light, carefree sound—as she found herself suddenly envisioning Jughead casually holding a wineglass while discussing politics with Hiram Lodge, the hundred or so candles decorating the first floor of Lodge Lodge causing shadows to dance distractingly over a set of interconnecting brass rings adorning his fingers. “Oh, please,” she said after a minute, a teasing smile fully suffusing her voice, “you knew  _ exactly _ where you were coming tonight. It’s not my fault you didn’t bring your toys for show-and-tell.”

Jughead’s earlier chuckle gave way to a full-throated laugh at Betty’s unapologetic cheekiness; and for the briefest of moments, Betty found herself wondering why she’d had any misgivings at all about him coming to the Revealing Ceremony with her. 

It took her a second to realize he’d actually been talking to her as he laughed, and she could feel her cheeks heating up as she sheepishly asked him to repeat himself. 

He laughed again, and for a split second, there was something about the sound of his voice that made the skin on the back of her neck tingle—like he knew he’d caught her doing something naughty. The thought—even as ridiculous as it was—only made the radiating heat in her cheeks burn hotter. 

“Will I see you before the ceremony starts?” she eventually heard him say after forcing all of her attention on to the other end of her phone.

She quickly pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the time before throwing a cautious glance at the partially ajar door of the guest bedroom. Through the small crack of light between the door and the door jamb, she could just make out the junior event planner scurrying after Veronica as she began pacing around the room. With a small wistful sigh, Betty turned her attention back to her phone. “Probably not,” she said, trying not to let the full scope of her disappointment bleed into her voice, “the ceremony is going to start soon, and I may have to talk V off a ledge before then.”

There was a beat of silence as Jughead processed what she’d said. Even though she knew it sounded crazy, Betty would’ve sworn that she could feel his disappointment as surely as if it were as tangible as the phone in her hand. She shook her head to dislodge the ridiculous thought, nearly missing it when he said, “Then I shall just continue to wait with baited breath.” 

Before Betty could think of a response, there was a tinny metallic clatter on the other side of the door to Veronica’s temporary dressing room followed by V’s unmistakable voice shouting, “Seriously?!” Cringing internally, Betty gave Jughead a rushed “See you soon,” before promptly disconnecting the call and slipping back inside the room as unobtrusively as she could manage. 

*

He should never have agreed to Betty’s plan to pose as her fake boyfriend, and he certainly shouldn’t have agreed to do it under  _ these _ circumstances. 

Although everything about Lodge Lodge had been over-the-top, as he’d done a lap around the first floor checking out all of the appetizers and canapés that were being circulated by men in suits that were  _ far _ too expensive to belong to caterers, he couldn’t deny that there was a certain romanticism to the space: he felt like he’d suddenly stepped into the music video of an ‘80s power ballad. Gauzy, white single panel curtains stretched down from the 15’ ceilings, every so often fluttering like gossamer fairy wings whenever a breeze filtered through the French doors opening on to the patio, and he’d been forced to dodge a surprisingly large assortment of white and gold candles seemingly placed at random throughout the room as he’d religiously chased after a “caterer” with a silver tray piled high with mini filet mignon sliders. 

Even though he knew from his limited interaction with Veronica that she and Betty were night and day in just about every respect, the fact that he was standing in the middle of Lodge Lodge  _ at all _ was an unhappy reminder to him that things like this and people like the Lodges were still a very real part of Betty’s world. A sour feeling began to settle into his stomach as FP’s voice whispered in the back of his mind, ‘ _ I told you to stay away from that Northsider, boy.’  _ A silver tray passed by the edge of his vision and he blindly reached for it hoping that whatever he’d grabbed would help calm down his growing queasiness. 

He’d barely swallowed the deconstructed tuna tartare-topped deviled egg smeared on a toast round when he found himself suddenly being directed to a small staging area by an officious woman in a jet black catsuit with a wireless earpiece that was nearly as large as her ear. As he took his place among the Northsiders, a hush fell over the room before the vaguely familiar sound of Vivaldi’s  _ Spring _ began drifting from a pair of discreetly placed speakers. A few notes into the song, Jughead watched as Archie came to stand in front of a small dais flanked on either side by two people Jug faintly remembered were his parents. 

Keeping his eyes on Archie’s face, Jughead knew the minute Archie caught sight of Veronica—his expression morphing from one of nauseous anticipation to dumb-struck awe. As the music continued to swell, a disembodied voice layered in over the classical selection directing “ _ those assembled to please turn your attention to the stairs _ .” Turning in unison with the rest of the crowd, Jug couldn’t stop the cynical thought from crossing his mind that he was already beginning to become more sheep-like the longer he spent around Northsiders. A soft murmur passed through the crowd as more people caught sight of Veronica descending the stairs from the second floor escorted on either side by her parents. 

Although he knew he shouldn’t stare, Jug couldn’t help himself as his eyes locked on to Betty with laser-guided focus as she trailed several steps behind the Lodges. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls as he drank in the sight of her floating down the stairs in her fitted, ice blue off-the-shoulder dress. He forced himself not to fixate on the way the sweetheart neckline of her dress accentuated the naturally voluptuous swell of her breasts; and he desperately tried to ignore how badly he wanted to explore every erogenous zone he could find along the delicate column of her exposed neck. 

As the Lodges reached the bottom of the stairs and crossed the room toward the dais where the Andrews’ were standing, the rest of the assembled crowd turned in sync to follow their advance; however, Jughead found himself lingering a few seconds longer due to the hold Betty had over his attention. When she finally reached the bottom of the stairs, she momentarily glanced up, her green eyes immediately honing in on his smoldering gaze. 

Betty nibbled her bottom lip for a second as she held his eye before ducking her head down, a pale pink hue beginning to blossom across her cheeks, and he felt his dick start to traitorously twitch. She briefly glanced back up at him through the partial curtain of her hair, a shy smile hovering at the corner of her mouth, and he forced himself to turn his attention toward the dais along with the rest of the crowd. Even though he wasn’t wearing a bespoke suit, he didn’t trust that the cut of his off-the-rack slacks would be sufficient to conceal his hard-on if his cock swelled any further. Closing his eyes, Jughead forced himself to think of  _ anything _ that would distract his thoughts from his sudden desire to pull Betty into a bathroom to see how downright  _ filthy _ she could be. As much as his imagination tried to rebel by envisioning what type ( _ if any _ ) of lingerie she was wearing under her meticulously tailored dress, he ruthlessly corralled his thoughts back to safer topics like the time Sweet Pea shotgunned a beer Fangs had accidentally dropped and the pressure forced the beer out his nose or the time Jellybean fractured her wrist in a demolition derby accident. 

By the time he heard the last few notes of the recorded string instruments die out, he felt his cock was sufficiently soft enough to risk reopening his eyes. 

*

Over the years, Betty had been to a handful of Revealing Ceremonies. Being unmarked at the time, she’d felt an almost clinical detachment during them though—appreciating the sentiment of the traditions because of what they stood for, but without the emotional resonance of “ _ This could be me someday. _ ” As Mary Andrews stepped on to the dais to begin the ceremony though, Betty found herself blinking away the beginnings of tears as she peeked over at Jughead and felt a warm heat, like a recent sunburn, begin to radiate from just under her breast. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Mrs. Andrews holding Archie and Veronica’s hands, and she forced her attention back to her friends as Mary’s voice slowly quieted whatever remaining din was running through the crowd of guests.

Turning her attention from Archie to Veronica and back, Mrs. Andrews beamed as she blinked away her own tears of happiness before saying, “Archie, Veronica, I give to you a mother’s love. It is a bond that is everlasting and eternal from the moment you took your first breath to the day I take my last one. It is protective during times of fear and uncertainty, and a source of calm during times of turbulence. I give you both a mother’s love so that your own love—as embodied by your soul marks—will remain everlasting; so that it will help protect you both against a world that, at times, can be harsh and unforgiving; and so that it will serve to anchor you as you learn to navigate your new life having one soul with an equally vibrant existence in two bodies.”

Mary bent over to kiss Archie and Veronica on the head before standing up and running the back of her index fingers under her eyes to catch the newest tears that were threatening to leave big splotchy tracks in her make-up. Unbidden, Betty felt her thoughts temporarily turn to Alice. She couldn’t help the small flare of jealousy that shot through her over the level of emotional intimacy Archie and Veronica clearly had with Mrs. Andrews. 

There was a small lull as Archie’s mom stepped off the dais and Hiram Lodge took her place. Unlike the affection that had radiated off Mary Andrews as she’d looked at Archie and Veronica, the look Hiram gave his daughter and his future son-in-law was decidedly more shrewd and calculating. Eventually he gave them both a shark-like smile that made the hairs on the back of Betty’s neck stand on end before he said in an oily voice, “ _ Mi hija _ . Archie. I give you both a father’s strength. As the head of the  _ familia _ , a father must make difficult decisions in the family’s best interest because the family must always come before all others. I give you both a father’s strength so that you have the fortitude to make the hard choices necessary to protect your family in the months and years ahead.” Hiram leaned over to kiss Veronica on the cheek, and Betty could just make out that he whispered something into her hair that caused her to stand up a little bit straighter, before he turned to Archie and gripped his hand with nearly white knuckle intensity. 

As he sidled off the dais Betty could practically feel the tension rolling off Veronica in waves until Fred Andrews took her father’s place on the platform. The warmth in Mr. Andrews’ demeanor was the complete opposite of Hiram Lodge’s attitude. His eyes held nothing but kindness as he looked at Archie and Veronica and patted each of them on the shoulder. A soft smile spread across his face as he said, “Arch, Ronnie, I give you both a father’s wisdom. Every decision you make goes on to form who you are, and more importantly, who you’ll become. That’s why I give you both a father’s wisdom—so that you’ll have the knowledge you need to recognize what the right thing to do is, the confidence in your decisions so that you won’t need to lie about them, and the ability to be at peace with the consequences of your decisions.” Fred paused for a moment then pulled Archie and Veronica into a tight bear hug before he stepped off the dais and went to stand back next to Mary. 

There was a brief lull, then Hiram held out his hand and helped Hermione Lodge step up on to the dais. Hermione looked at Veronica before glancing at Archie, and gave both of them a small, perfunctory smile. She quietly unzipped a small, plum-colored beaded wristlet and took out a 3 x 5 index card that Betty could see was covered on one side in a cramped, but delicate script. Mrs. Lodge’s eyes quickly skimmed over her notes before she turned her complete attention back to the small crowd. Wetting her lips, she said, “Veronica, Archie, I give you both the gift of a mother’s courage. There is nothing a mother wouldn’t do for her child, especially if it’s to keep her safe. A mother must do what’s best for her child even if her child thinks she doesn’t need to be protected and that her mother is just trying to smother her, and even if what’s best for the child comes at a personal cost to herself. I give you both the gift of a mother’s courage so that you can do what you need to in order to protect each other and your new family, even when one of you thinks it's unnecessary.” 

An awkward silence settled over the crowd of assembled guests as Hermione tucked her index card back into her wristlet before she pivoted sharply on her heel and returned to her place next to her husband. 

Betty did her best to scramble on to the dais as gracefully as she could once she saw Hiram begin to loop his arm around Hermione’s waist. When they’d done the walkthrough of the ceremony with the coordinator earlier in the day, Betty had been instructed to wait a full two minutes before starting the transition to her speech; however, the coordinator has set forth her mandate without accounting for just who the Lodges were as a family. The blood in her ears was pounding so loudly as she made her way to the middle of the small platform that she couldn’t even hear the  _ clickclickclickclick _ of her heels as she speedwalked. As she reached the mark the coordinator had previously identified with a tiny strip of red electrical tape, her eyes focused blindly on Veronica and Archie without being able to fully comprehend the expression on either of their faces. 

As she stood on the little stage, Betty felt her heart jackhammering against her ribcage, and for the briefest second, she felt like she was on the verge of throwing up. A slight movement in the crowd of guests caught her attention as her already overactive “fight or flight” response abruptly kicked into overdrive. Looking up in the direction of the tiny disturbance, Betty found herself suddenly staring into Jughead’s captivating blue eyes. It took her a second, but she eventually realized he was mouthing, ‘ _ Take a breath. You’ve got this _ .’ The winch that had been compressing her lungs slowly began to ease up as Betty soaked in his calming essence. 

Closing her eyes, she focused her thoughts on Jughead until the tension bled out of her shoulders; and a bashful smile slowly broke out across her face. When she eventually reopened her eyes, she glanced briefly at him—internally fighting the urge to give him a discreet wave—before returning her full attention back to Veronica and Archie. Beaming at her two friends, she said, “V, Archie, I give you both the gift of friendship. Archie, I’ve known you nearly all our lives, and I knew from the moment I first saw you and V together that you were endgame for each other—perfectly in sync from the very start. V, I’ve known you nearly half my life; you’re my sister from another mister—like a favorite cousin I could always depend on to join me for my wildest hijinks. As you both go on your new soul-bound journey together, remember what brought you close to begin with—companionship, common interests, respect—the truest foundations of any friendship. This is why I give you both the gift of friendship, so that your eternal love has the solidest foundation possible.” 

Betty could  _ feel _ the collective “awww” that the crowd was just waiting to release when out of nowhere there was a high pitched squeal at a decibel only dogs could hear right before Veronica was yanking her off the platform and into a rib-bruising hug. Collapsing against Veronica with a soft  _ oof _ , Betty barely managed to avoid being suffocated by her friends as Archie wrapped her up in a hug from the other side. Her fingers flailed a little frantically as she started to feel her oxygen getting cut off when she finally started to feel the grip of Archie’s arms loosen. 

When V finally released her as well, Betty had a split second to glance over the crowd before going to stand with Fred and Mary Andrews. While everyone else’s attention was completely focused back on Veronica and Archie, Betty found Jughead’s attention was solely on her, an odd look on his face—his mouth curved up in the faintest hint of a smirk, but his eyes smoldering with something Betty was almost tempted to say was a mix of jealousy and desire. She held his gaze for what felt like a few seconds longer than what was probably appropriate—it being Veronica and Archie’s Revealing Ceremony—until she could feel an embarrassed flush spreading down her neck and across the exposed tops of her breasts. Betty finally managed to tear her eyes away from his when the officious, disembodied voice of the event coordinator filtered through one of the hidden speakers, stating, “Now that the Gifts of Blessing have been bestowed, all of the guests are…”

Betty’s heart started racing even as the voice was drowned out by the sudden sound of a helicopter landing. They’d gone over the order of the ceremony several times that afternoon, and Betty knew they were about to perform the Circle of Love. Her hands began to itch with a familiar desire to focus on something other than her nervousness as she found herself, not for the first time, imagining kissing Jughead. Before she had a chance to get too lost in her daydream, she heard Mary Andrews asking, “There’s a helicopter now? Was there a last minute change to the ceremony?” 

Looking over at the Lodges, Betty could tell they were annoyed, albeit not surprised by the dramatic entrance, and she realized then that the helicopter must’ve been the one V had been musing about earlier that evening. Turning back to Mrs. Andrews, she replied, “I think those might be some guests arriving late? V mentioned it to me earlier that they had a helicopter.”

Mary looked over at the helicopter with an unimpressed look before rolling her eyes and muttering, “Of course they do.” 

Betty tried her best to swallow her surprised laughter as Fred Andrews held out his arms to her and his wife to begin processing out to the back lawn with the rest of the guests to form the Circle of Love.

*

Jughead was nearly positive he’d never sweated so profusely in his life—not even when he did a nine month stint in Juvie for attempted arson. He tried to take a deep breath as discreetly as he could, but made the mistake of accidentally looking at Betty’s profile and forgot how to breath mid-inhale instead. As he’d briefly started choking, a smarmy-looking guy named Nick-something-or-other started smirking at him from behind Betty’s back, and Jughead immediately felt his hackles rising.

He wasn’t entirely sure _why_ the coordinator had given Nick a spot in the Circle of Love. Betty had been quite insistent that only _couples_ were allowed to be there, and Jughead definitely hadn’t noticed a significant other get off the helicopter with him and his parents. Before he had a chance to ask Betty about it though, he happened to overhear some young woman who’d introduced herself as Katy mention to her date, “_Thank God Veronica is friends with practically the only _unmarked_ person in the area. I can only imagine _the fit_ Nick would’ve thrown after being forcibly brought here by his parents only to be prohibited from being in Ronnie’s Circle of Love_.” 

Even though he wanted to find out what she had meant, before he had the chance to reveal his eavesdropping, the event coordinator was clapping her hands to bring everyone’s attention to where Veronica and Archie were standing. Dutifully turning his attention toward the center of the circle, he caught a glimpse of Betty looking up at him through her eyelashes as she nibbled her bottom lip, and he suddenly forgot everything he’d been thinking about since before he even arrived at Lodge Lodge. His mouth went dry as she realized he’d caught her and the beguiling blush she’d worn earlier in the evening came rushing back, turning her skin the most enticing shade of strawberries and cream. Her eyes flickered away from his after a moment like he’d caught her doing something forbidden, and he tried to ignore the way his cock twitched as he errantly wondered what her skin would look like if he saw her doing something  _ actually  _ risqué. 

Once the coordinator was satisfied that everyone’s attention was focused on Veronica and Archie, she said, “As you all know, the Circle of Love is the glue that binds the entire Revealing Ceremony together. It is the strongest, most vibrant bond for the soul marks to connect to, so it is  _ imperative  _ that all of you listen to me very closely right now. There must be a continuous cascade of love going around the outer edge of the circle until every couple has had a chance to kiss at which point, Veronica and Archie will add their kiss to the Circle of Love. Once they have done that, there will be a brief pause of approximately  _ ten _ minutes so the confirmation can take place. After it’s been confirmed that their soul marks have activated, they will come back out to display them. Then, there will be a reception to follow in the lower gardens just to your right.” 

The woman walked purposefully toward the Lodges after finishing her brief speech only stopping briefly to have a quiet word with Hiram and Fred Andrews as she reached the circle’s edge. After the two men gave her mirroring nods of confirmation, she slipped out of the ring of people; and Jughead tried to ignore the sudden buzzing in his skin. 

A moment later, he watched in slightly muted shock as Hiram pulled Hermione in for what was probably the most clinical, emotionally uninvested kiss he’d ever seen in his life. The Lodges’ kiss seemed to linger for several heartbeats, and Jughead was more than a little disappointed that The Kiss he’d built up in his mind was unlikely to match the reality of it and he tried to swallow his disappointment.

The blue cloud of anticipatory dejection settling over him dissipated though as soon as he saw Fred kiss Mary Andrews. Unlike the almost uncomfortable kiss he’d just witnessed, there was an undeniable sense of warmth and affection that radiated from Archie’s parents, and it caused the anxiety he’d been dealing with for days to begin bubbling back up inside him. 

As each subsequent couple in the circle kissed, it was soon clear to him that Veronica’s parents were the outlier. While he didn’t have much experience with Revealing Ceremonies—and certainly none with any involving the pomp and circumstance of the current one—he did find himself wondering if the lackluster kiss Veronica’s parents shared somehow  _ could _ impact Archie and Veronica’s soul marks. The cynical part of him scoffed at the idea, but he couldn’t ignore FP’s voice in the back of his mind: “ _ Keep it  _ simple.  _ You start getting fancy, you invite trouble. _ ” 

Jughead was still mulling over his father’s words when he heard Betty softly calling his name. As he brought his attention to her face, he was dumbstruck by the hope and anticipation he saw shining from her clear green eyes. The anxiety he’d been grappling with for a week that he could wind up accidentally soul bound to Betty came roaring back, and he momentarily froze up.

The delay was hardly lengthy by any means, but it was still long enough for him to hear Nick say with a disturbing amount of enthusiasm, “I guess this means  _ Jockstrap _ won’t mind if I step in then.” 

*

Betty was in shock.

A moment before, she’d been staring into Jughead’s eyes, the butterflies in her stomach turning into hummingbirds as she saw the awe written across his face. She could feel herself holding her breath as she unconsciously leaned infinitesimally closer to him, briefly wetting her lips in anticipation.

The next thing she knew, a hand grabbed her by the bicep and spun her around before the taste of cherry Robitussin was abruptly invading her mouth. Another arm wrapped around her waist, holding her tightly to the man kissing her, and her stomach began to revolt from the overwhelming scent of bergamot overpowering her nose. 

It was the urge to puke that finally broke the shock hold over her body and she shrieked into the kiss as she struggled to pull away from the man. His arm squeezed her waist tighter to the point Betty was confident there was a good chance she’d have some bruising. 

Suddenly, she felt herself being ripped out of the other man’s stranglehold a moment before a spray of tiny red droplets spattered on to her dress. Looking up from the fresh blood stains on her dress, Betty saw a scene that looked like it was ripped straight from one of the novels she edited. Jughead was looming over an irate young man on the ground, arm pulled back to strike again as Fred and Archie Andrews tried to keep them separated. The man on the ground was screaming “ _ He broke my nose _ ” as he held his hand to his face, blood pouring down his chin. Veronica’s parents were standing with a couple Betty vaguely remembered being introduced to as the St. Clairs—Mr. St. Clair pointing wildly between Jughead and his son while Hermione’s hands waved wildly about in a series of gestures that Betty recognized meant “ _ Well, what do you expect us to do? _ ” Finally, Betty looked for Veronica, only to find her sobbing uncontrollably into her  _ abuela _ ’s shoulder. 

As the extent of the situation sunk in, Betty’s stomach lurched with the realization that her premonition that morning about ruining Veronica’s day had come true. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!!!
> 
> If you feel so inspired, comments/fic recs/kudos/reblogs are ALWAYS appreciated!!!

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU ALL FOR TAKING THE TIME TO READ! 
> 
> Comments/kudos/reblogs are always appreciated! 🥰🥰🥰


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